Experimental study on crack-healing in expansive soil using EICP under cyclic wetting and drying conditions

Abstract

Enzyme induced carbonate precipitation (EICP) is an emerging eco-friendly soil stabilization technique that produces calcium carbonate precipitation (CaCO₃) using a urease enzyme harvested from plants. The formation of CaCO₃ restricts the soil grain movement, affecting the original moisture variation-induced crack development. This study used indoor drying-wetting cycle simulation tests to examine crack development mechanism, swelling-shrinkage characteristics and lateral swelling pressure of expansive soil along with the related mechanism of EICP repairing and reinforcement effect on the cracks. The lateral swelling pressure of the samples was measured using the confined humidification expansion test setup, and a time history curve of its evolution during the humidification process was generated. The results have shown that, during the EICP crack-repairing and reinforcement process of cracked untreated expansive soil, the EICP solution rapidly infiltrated into the soil along the fracture channel, and finally formed a CaCO₃ solidification network. With the increase in the number of reinforcements after each drying-wetting cycle, the CaCO₃ gradually filled the internal cracks of the soil and enhanced the crack mitigation. The crack development in EICP repaired expansive soil sample could be divided into three stages: crack generation, crack shrinkage, and stability stages. Finally, the obtained data were compared and analyzed to explore the change law of lateral swelling pressure of EICP repaired cracks of the expansive soil, and a prediction model of the peak lateral swelling pressure of EICP-treated expansive soil at different depths was established.

Keywords

Enzyme-induced carbonate precipitation (EICP) / Drying-wetting cycles / Unsaturated soils / Expansive soils / Lateral swelling pressure / Crack-healing

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yunlong Liu: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Le Chang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Methodology. Yanyan Xia: Investigation, Formal analysis. Bantayehu Uba Uge: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the research funding and financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52478372), and the Henan Province Science and Technology Key Project (Grant No. 252102240027, Grant No. 242102320006). Also, the authors are thankful to the anonymous reviewers whose comments were valuable and have significantly contributed to this paper.

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