Microstructural and Geomechanical Study on Biocemented Sand for Optimization of MICP Process
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 31, Issue 4
Abstract
Limited research has been reported on strength improvement of biocemented soils in relation to crystal patterns of microbially induced calcite () precipitation (MICP). In this study, sand samples were treated under the coeffect of different bacterial culture (BC) and cementation solution (CS) concentrations to evaluate the optimum BC and CS combination that yields the highest soil strength. It was found that for lower CS conditions (0.25 M), higher BC produced stronger samples, whereas for higher CS conditions (0.5 M or 1 M), lower BC was more dominant in improving the soil strength. This can be attributed to the effectively precipitated crystals, which were in rhombohedral shape and large size and were concentrated at the soil pore throat rather than deposited on the individual sand grain surface. This finding was confirmed with the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis. The strength and permeability of the optimized biocemented samples were also compared with sand samples treated with ordinary portland cement (OPC). The optimized biocemented sand provided higher strength and permeability than those obtained from the samples treated with similar content of OPC at a curing period of 28 days.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of Curtin International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (CIPRS) in supporting this research. The SEM experiments conducted in this research were undertaken using the EM instrumentation (ARC LE130100053) at the John de Laeter Centre, Curtin University.
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 31 • Issue 4 • April 2019
Copyright
©2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 9, 2018
Accepted: Sep 28, 2018
Published online: Jan 31, 2019
Published in print: Apr 1, 2019
Discussion open until: Jun 30, 2019
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