A New Approach for Dewatering Slurry: Vacuum Preloaded Geotextile Tube
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 36, Issue 7
Abstract
The geotechnical tube technology has been widely used in the dewatering treatment of high-water-content slurries, such as engineering waste muds, mine water sludges, and dredging slurries. However, the existing engineering practice adopting the traditional geotextile tubes is characterized by low efficiency and difficult quality control. To address these issues, a new approach was developed by combining the geotextile tubes and vacuum preloading technology. In this method, several plastic drain boards were embedded in a geotextile tube as prefabricated horizontal drains (PHDs), and a vacuum was applied to promote drainage. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by a comparison test. A two-dimensional plane-strain analytical consolidation problem with a distributed drainage boundary was then formulated and solved to predict the consolidation process of soil in a vacuum preloaded geotextile tube. The analytical solution was validated against the results of a pilot field test, and then the influence of PHD spacing on the consolidation process was also discussed. Compared to the traditional geotextile tubes, the approach proposed in this paper promises good applicability and can effectively shorten the treatment time by 73.3% and reduce the water content of treated soils by 51.9%.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors are most grateful and express their profound thanks for the support and funding this study has benefited from as follows: the study is supported by the General Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52078464); Key research and development program of Lishui (2022ZDYF01).
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 36 • Issue 7 • July 2024
Copyright
© 2024 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 3, 2023
Accepted: Dec 27, 2023
Published online: May 2, 2024
Published in print: Jul 1, 2024
Discussion open until: Oct 2, 2024
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