Small-Scale Mechanical Properties of Biopolymers
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 138, Issue 9
Abstract
The use of biopolymers to improve the engineering properties of soil has received attention in recent years, stimulated by potential cost savings and the low environmental impact of this class of materials. The purpose of this work is to improve the understanding of precisely how biopolymers strengthen soil and to quantify the small-scale mechanical properties of biopolymers for implementation in physics-based numerical models. The authors describe the initial efforts to develop viable methods to form biopolymer bonds between grains of naturally occurring materials and present the results of mechanical properties experiments on these bonds. The subject biopolymer was an exopolysaccharide from Rhizobium tropici (ATCC #49672). The initial experiments indicate that the stiffness of bonds ranged from 1 GPa after approximately 1 h of curing to plateau values as high as 3.8 GPa for extended cure times. For bonds with neck areas in the range of 0.01–0.06 mm2, the cohesive tensile strength of the bonds ranged from 16 to 62 MPa, but averaged ≈20 MPa. The associated cohesive failure strains in tension ranged from 0.013 to 0.042. Cyclic loading experiments were conducted to provide information on the mechanical behavior of the biopolymer and to support subsequent constitutive modeling. The results are analyzed and discussed in terms of the underlying viscoelastic behavior, paying particular attention to the variations in stiffness and internal friction as functions of cure time, frequency, and amplitude.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of ERDC Military Engineering program’s basic research project entitled, “Biopolymer Coating Effects on Particle Micro-Structure.”
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 138 • Issue 9 • September 2012
Pages: 1063 - 1074
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 28, 2010
Accepted: Dec 6, 2011
Published online: Dec 8, 2011
Published in print: Sep 1, 2012
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