Effect of Polyacrylamide on Improvement of Dredger Fill with Vacuum Preloading Method
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 31, Issue 9
Abstract
Dredger fill possesses undesirable engineering properties due to high water content, compressibility, and low permeability, causing insufficient consolidation and long treatment periods using a vacuum preloading method. This paper investigates an advanced treatment method using chemically additive polyacrylamide (PAM) on dredger fill combined with a vacuum preloading method via laboratory model tests. Anionic polyacrylamide (APAM, a PAM class based on ionic classification) exhibited better performance on accelerating water discharge, reducing the time for trial filtration tests almost in half, and so was adopted in vacuum preloading model tests. The test results show that the application of APAM reduces 30% to 50% of the dredger fill consolidation time, accelerates the dissipation of excess pore pressure, and reduces the vacuum loss in vertical transition for the whole treatment duration. The vane shear strength post-treatment was observed to increase by 30% to 55% with an additive percentage of of APAM, which is proposed for the treatment of Tianjin Binhai dredger fill. The results provide a novelty approach to the physical mechanical alteration of dredged fill to break through the unsatisfactory limitation of conventional vacuum preloading treatment.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the National Key R&D Plan (Grant No. 2017YFC0805402), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51578371), Open Project Fund of State Key Laboratory of Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering (Grant No. SLDRCE17-01), and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Special Projects of Cooperation (Grant No. 16JCJDJC40000) for funding this work.
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Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 31 • Issue 9 • September 2019
Copyright
©2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 26, 2018
Accepted: Apr 10, 2019
Published online: Jun 21, 2019
Published in print: Sep 1, 2019
Discussion open until: Nov 21, 2019
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