• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• 제14권3호
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• pp.247-255
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• 2018

Soil stabilization can make the soils becoming more stable by using an admixture to the soil. Lime stabilization enhances the engineering properties of soil, which includes reducing soil plasticity, increasing optimum moisture content, decreasing maximum dry density and improving soil compaction. Silica fume is utilized as a pozzolanic material in the application of soil stabilization. Silica fume was once considered non-environmental friendly. In this paper, the materials required are kaolin grade S300, lime and silica fume. The focus of the study is on the determination of the physical properties of the soils tested and the consolidation of kaolin mixed with 6% silica fume and different percentages (3%, 5%, 7% and 9%) of lime. Consolidation test is carried out on the kaolin and the mixtures of soil-lime-silica fume to investigate the effect of lime stabilization with silica fume additives on the consolidation of the mixtures. Based on the results obtained, all soil samples are indicated as soils with medium plasticity. For mixtures with 0% to 9% of lime with 6% SF, the decrease in the maximum dry density is about 15.9% and the increase in the optimum moisture content is about 23.5%. Decreases in the coefficient of permeability of the mixtures occur if compared to the coefficient of permeability of kaolin soft clay itself reduce the compression index (Cc) more than L-SF soil mix due to pozzolanic reaction between lime and silica fume and the optimum percent of lime-silica fume was found to be (5%+6%) mix. The average coefficient of volume compressibility decreases with increasing the stabilizer content due to pozzolanic reaction happening within the soil which results in changes in the soil matrix. Lime content +6% silica fume mix can reduce the coefficient of consolidation from at 3%L+6%SF, thereafter there is an increase from 9%L+6%SF mix. The optimal percentage of lime silica fume combination is attained at 5.0% lime and 6.0% silica fume in order to improve the shear strength of kaolin soft clay. Microstructural development took place in the stabilized soil due to increase in lime content of tertiary clay stabilized with 7% lime and 4% silica fume together.

• Advances in environmental research
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• 제6권3호
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• pp.159-171
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• 2017

A successful oil well drilling depends largely on a good mud Program. During drilling, mud provides sufficient hydrostatic pressure, removes drill cuttings and cools drill bits. Mud additives are always required to provide sufficient hydrostatic pressure to ensure borehole stability. Barium Sulphate ($BaSO_4$) also known as barite is the prevalent weighting material but there is needed to develop local materials to augment the use of Barite. The present search is concerned on the early Carboniferous succession exposed in Um Bogma Formation, west central Sinai, Egypt as a new weighting agent in drilling fluids. The increases in the cost of drilling fluids and a shortage of using barite have introduced the locale dolomite as alternative weighting materials. The rheological properties of mud drilling samples weighted by local dolomite samples are being examined and investigated to know its potential to be used as a weighting material in drilling mud. Two mud samples were prepared which comprised of fresh water, caustic soda, bentonite and the weighting material. The weighting materials are added to achieve the required density. The first sample: Water-based mud with commercial barite of density between 10.00 lb/gm and 18.00 lb/gm. The second sample: Water-based mud with dolomite of density between 10.00 lb/gm and 18.00 lb/gm. These samples were analyzed and the density, rheological properties, aging of barite and dolomite and solid contents were investigated. At 10.00 lb/gm, the yield point of dolomite was $20.00lb/100ft^2$ and barite $22.00lb/100ft^2$ while the 10 second gel strength of dolomite was $30.00lb/100ft^2$ and $22.00lb/100ft^2$ for barite. Similarly, little difference was observed in plastic and apparent viscosities. At 10.00 lb/gm, the plastic and apparent viscosities of dolomite were 8.00 cp and 20.00 cp while barite was 8.00 cp and 24.00 cp. The result show that dolomite mud sample gave a little higher yield point and gel strength than barite mud sample. Therefore, dolomite has the potential to be used as weighting material in drilling mud in place of barite thereby enhancing the local content initiative of the government. When dolomite is sourced locally and used it will reduce overall mud and drilling costs.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• 제20권6호
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• pp.537-546
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• 2020

Oil and natural gas reserves have been recognised abundantly in clayey rich rock formations in deep costal reservoirs. It is necessary to understand the sedimentary history of those reservoir rocks to well explore these natural resources. This work designs a group of laboratory experiments to mimic the physical process of the sedimentary clay-rich rock formation. It presents characterisation results of the physical properties of the artificial clayey rocks synthesized from illite clay, quartz sand and brine water by high-pressure consolidation tests. Special focus is given on the effects of illite clay content and high-stress consolidation on the physical properties. Multi-step loaded consolidation experiments were carried out with stress up to 35 MPa on mixtures constituting of the illite clay, quartz sand and brine water with five initial illite clay contents (w=85%, 70%, 55%, 40% and 25%). Compressibility and void ratio were characterised throughout the physical compaction process of the mixtures constituting of five illite clay contents and their water permeability was measured as well. Results show that the applied stress induces a great reduction of clayey rock void ratio. Illite clay contents has a significant influence on the compressibility, void ratio and the permeability of the physically synthesized clayey rocks. There is a critical illite clay content w=70% that induces the minimum void ratio in the physically synthesised clayey rocks. The SEM study indicates, in the high-pressure synthesised clayey rocks with high illite clay contents, the illite clay minerals are located in layers and serve as the material matrix, and the quartz minerals fill in the inter-mineral pores or are embedded in the illite clay matrix. The arrangements of the minerals in microscale originate the structural anisotropy of the high-pressure synthesised clayey rock. The test findings can give an intuitive physical understanding of the deep-buried clayey rock basins in energy reservoirs.

• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• 제11권1호
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• pp.79-85
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• 2020

A single-stage deammonification with a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) that simultaneous nitritation, anaerobic ammonia oxidation (anammox), and denitrification (SNAD) occur in one reactor has been widely applied for sidestream of wastewater treatment plant. For the stable and well-balanced SNAD, a feeding strategy of influent wastewater is one of the most important operating factors in the single-stage deammonification SBR. In this study, single-stage deammonification SBR (working volume 30L) was operated to treat a high-strength ammonium wastewater (1200 mg NH₄⁺-N/L) with different feeding strategies (single feeding and nine-step feeding) under the condition without COD. Each cycle of the step feeding involved 6 sub-cycles consisted of aerobic and anoxic periods for partial nitritation (PN) and anammox, respectively. Contrary to unstable performance in the single feeding, the step feeding showed better deammonification performance (0.565 kg-N/m³/day). Under the condition with COD, however, the nitrogen removal rate (NRR) decreased to 0.403 kg-N/m³/day when the Nine-step feeding strategies had an additional denitrification period before sub-cycles for PN and anammox. The NRR was recovered to 0.518 kg-N/m³/day by introducing an enhanced multiple-step feeding strategy. The strategy had 50 cycles consisted of feed, denitrification, PN, and anammox, instead of repeated sub-cycles for PN and anammox. The multiple-step feeding strategy without sub-cycle showed the most stable and excellent deammonification performance: high nitrogen removal efficiency (98.6%), COD removal rate (0.131 kg-COD/m³/day), and COD removal efficiency (78.8%). This seemed to be caused by that the elimination of the sub-cycles might reduce COD oxidation during aerobic condition but increase the COD utilization for denitrification period. In addition, among various sensor values, the ORP pattern appeared to be applicable to monitor and control each reaction step for deammonification in the multiple-step feeding strategy without sub-cycle. Further study to optimize the number of multiple-step feeding is still needed but these results show that the multiple-step feeding strategy can contribute to a well-balanced SNAD for deammonification when treating high-strength ammonium wastewater with COD in the single-stage deammonification SBR.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제26권5호
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• pp.575-589
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• 2020

For vibration control of stay cables in cable-stayed bridges, viscous dampers are frequently used, and they are regularly installed between the cable and the bridge deck. In practice, neoprene rubber bushings (or of other types) are also widely installed inside the cable guide pipe, mainly for reducing the bending stresses of the cable near its anchorages. Therefore, it is important to understand the effect of the bushings on the performance of the external damper. Besides, for long cables, external dampers installed at a single position near a cable end can no longer provide enough damping due to the sag effect and the limited installation distance. It is thus of interest to improve cable damping by additionally installing dampers inside the guide pipe. This paper hence studies the combined effects of an external damper and an internal damper (which can also model the bushings) on a stay cable. The internal damper is assumed to be a High Damping Rubber (HDR) damper, and the external damper is considered to be a viscous damper with intrinsic stiffness, and the cable sag is also considered. Both the cases when the two dampers are installed close to one cable end and respectively close to the two cable ends are studied. Asymptotic design formulas are derived for both cases considering that the dampers are close to the cable ends. It is shown that when the two dampers are placed close to different cable ends, their combined damping effects are approximately the sum of their separate contributions, regardless of small cable sag and damper intrinsic stiffness. When the two dampers are installed close to the same end, maximum damping that can be achieved by the external damper is generally degraded, regardless of properties of the HDR damper. Field tests on an existing cable-stayed bridge have further validated the influence of the internal damper on the performance of the external damper. The results suggest that the HDR is optimally placed in the guide pipe of the cable-pylon anchorage when installing viscous dampers at one position is insufficient. When an HDR damper or the bushing has to be installed near the external damper, their combined damping effects need to be evaluated using the presented methods.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.99-105
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• 2018

Soils are generally classified as fine-grained or coarse-grained depending on the percentage content of the primary constituents. In reality, soils are actually made up of mixed and composite constituents. Soils primarily classified as fine-grained, still consists of a range of coarse particles as secondary constituents in between 0% to 50%. A laboratory scale model test was conducted to investigate the influence of coarse particles on the physical (e.g., density, water content, and void ratio) and mechanical (e.g., quick undrained shear strength) properties of primarily classified fine-grained cohesive soils. Pure kaolinite clay and sand-mixed kaolinite soil (e.g., sand content: 10%, 20%, and 30%) having various water contents (60%, 65%, and 70%) were preconsolidated at different stress levels (0, 13, 17.5, 22 kPa). The quick undrained shear strength properties were determined using the conventional Static Cone Penetration Test (SCPT) method and the new Fall Cone Test (FCT) method. The corresponding void ratios and densities with respect to the quick undrained shear strength were also observed. Correlations of the physical properties and quick undrained shear strengths derived from the SCPT and FCT were also established. Comparison of results showed a significant relationship between the two methods. From the results of FCT and SCPT, there is a decreasing trend of quick undrained shear strength, strength increase ratio ($S_u/P_o$), and void ratio (e) as the sand content is increased. The quick undrained shear strength generally decreases with increased water content. For the same water content, increasing the sand content resulted to a decrease in quick undrained shear strength due to reduced adhesion, and also, resulted to an increase in density. Similarly, it is observed that the change in density is distinctively noticeable at sand content greater than 20%. However, for sand content lower than 10%, there is minimal change in density with respect to water content. In general, the results showed a decrease in quick undrained shear strength for soils with higher amounts of sand content. Therefore, as the soil adhesion is reduced, the cone penetration resistances of the FCT and SCPT reflects internal friction and density of sand in the total shear strength.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제21권5호
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• pp.687-694
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• 2018

The problem of wheel tread defects has become a major challenge for the health management of high-speed rail as a wheel defect with small radius deviation may suffice to give rise to severe damage on both the train bogie components and the track structure when a train runs at high speeds. It is thus highly desirable to detect the defects soon after their occurrences and then conduct wheel turning for the defective wheelsets. Online wheel condition monitoring using wheel impact load detector (WILD) can be an effective solution, since it can assess the wheel condition and detect potential defects during train passage. This study aims to develop an FBG-based track-side wheel condition monitoring method for the detection of wheel tread defects. The track-side sensing system uses two FBG strain gauge arrays mounted on the rail foot, measuring the dynamic strains of the paired rails excited by passing wheelsets. Each FBG array has a length of about 3 m, slightly longer than the wheel circumference to ensure a full coverage for the detection of any potential defect on the tread. A defect detection algorithm is developed for using the online-monitored rail responses to identify the potential wheel tread defects. This algorithm consists of three steps: 1) strain data pre-processing by using a data smoothing technique to remove the trends; 2) diagnosis of novel responses by outlier analysis for the normalized data; and 3) local defect identification by a refined analysis on the novel responses extracted in Step 2. To verify the proposed method, a field test was conducted using a test train incorporating defective wheels. The train ran at different speeds on an instrumented track with the purpose of wheel condition monitoring. By using the proposed method to process the monitoring data, all the defects were identified and the results agreed well with those from the static inspection of the wheelsets in the depot. A comparison is also drawn for the detection accuracy under different running speeds of the test train, and the results show that the proposed method can achieve a satisfactory accuracy in wheel defect detection when the train runs at a speed higher than 30 kph. Some minor defects with a depth of 0.05 mm~0.06 mm are also successfully detected.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제21권5호
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• pp.623-635
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• 2018

In order to study the mechanical behavior of shield tunnel segments during assembly stage, the in-situ tests and FDM numerical simulation were conducted based on the Foguan Shiziyang Tunnel with large cross-section. Analysis for the load state of the assembling segments in different assembly steps as well as the investigation for the changing of inner forces and longitudinal stress of segments with assembling steps were carried out in this paper. By comparing the tested results with the simulated results, the conclusions and suggestions could be drawn as follows: (1) It is the most significant for the effects on axial force and bending moment caused by the assembly of adjacent segment, followed by the insertion of key segment while the effects in the other assembly steps are relative smaller. With the increasing value of axial force, the negative bending moment turns into positive and remains increasing in most monitored sections, while the bending moment of segment B1and B6 are negative and keeping increasing; (2) The closer the monitored section to the adjacent segments or the key segment, the more significant the internal forces response, and the monitored effects of key segment insertion are more obvious than that of calculation; (3) The axial forces are all in compression during assembling and the monitored values are about 1.5~1.75 times larger than the calculated values, and the monitored values of bending moment are about 2 times the numerical calculation. The bending moment is more sensitive to the segments assembly process compared with axial force, and it will result in the large bending moment of segments during assembling when the construction parameters are not suitable or the assembly error is too large. However, the internal forces in assembly stage are less than those in normal service stage; (4) The distribution of longitudinal stress has strong influence on the changing of the internal forces. The segment side surface and intrados in the middle of two adjacent jacks are the crack-sensitive positions in the early assembly stage, and subsequently segment corners far away from the jacks become the crack-sensitive parts either.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• 제16권3호
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• pp.273-284
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• 2018

A detailed understanding of the mechanical behaviors for crushed coal rocks after grouting is a key for construction in the broken zones of mining engineering. In this research, experiments of grouting into the crushed coal rock using independently developed test equipment for solving the problem of sampling of crushed coal rocks have been carried out. The application of uniaxial compression was used to approximately simulate the ground stress in real engineering. In combination with the analysis of crack evolution and failure modes for the grouted specimens, the influences of different crushed degrees of coal rock (CDCR) and solidified grout strength (SGS) on the mechanical behavior of grouted specimens under uniaxial compression were investigated. The research demonstrated that first, the UCS of grouted specimens decreased with the decrease in the CDCR at constant SGS (except for the SGS of 12.3 MPa). However, the UCS of grouted specimens for constant CDCR increased when the SGS increased; optimum solidification strengths for grouts between 19.3 and 23.0 MPa were obtained. The elastic moduli of the grouted specimens with different CDCR generally increased with increasing SGS, and the peak axial strain showed a slightly nonlinear decrease with increasing SGS. The supporting effect of the skeleton structure produced by the solidified grouts was increasingly obvious with increasing CDCR and SGS. The possible evolution of internal cracks for the grouted specimens was classified into three stages: (1) cracks initiating along the interfaces between the coal blocks and solidified grouts; (2) cracks initiating and propagating in coal blocks; and (3) cracks continually propagating successively in the interfaces, the coal blocks, and the solidified grouts near the coal blocks. Finally, after the propagation and coalescence of internal cracks through the entire specimens, there were two main failure modes for the failed grouted specimens. These modes included the inclined shear failure occurring in the more crushed coal rock and the splitting failure occurring in the less crushed coal rock. Both modes were different from the single failure mode along the fissure for the fractured coal rock after grouting solidification. However, compared to the brittle failure of intact coal rock, grouting into the different crushed degree coal rocks resulted in ductile deformation after the peak strength for the grouted specimens was attained.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제36권5호
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• pp.553-568
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• 2020

Steel-concrete composite structures have been extensively used in building, bridges, and other civil engineering infrastructure. Shear stud connectors between steel and concrete are essential in composite members to guarantee the effectiveness of their behavior in terms of strength and deformability. This study focuses on investigating the shear stiffness of headed studs embedded in several types of concrete with wide range of compressive strength, and their effects on the elastic behavior of steel-concrete composite girders were evaluated. Firstly, totally 206 monotonic push-out tests from the literature were reviewed to investigate the shear stiffness of headed studs embedded in various types of concrete (NC, HPC, UHPC etc.). Shear stiffness of studs is defined as the secant stiffness of the load-slip curve at 0.5V_u, and a formulation for predicting defined shear stiffness in elastic state was proposed, indicating that the stud diameter and the elastic modulus of steel and concrete are the main factors. And the shear stiffness predicted by the new formula agree well with test results for studs with a diameter ranging from 10 to 30 mm in the concrete with compressive strength ranging from 22.0 to 200.0MPa. Then, the effects of shear stiffness on the elastic behaviors of composite girders with different sizes and under different loading conditions were analyzed, the equations for calculating the stress and deformation of simply supported composite girders considering the influence of connection's shear stiffness were derived under different loading conditions using classical linear partial-interaction theory. As the increasing of shear stiffness, the stress and deflection at the most unfavorable section under partial connected condition tend to be those under full connected condition, but the approaching speed decreases gradually. Finally, the connector's shear stiffness was recommended for fully connection in composite girders with different dimensions under different loading conditions. The findings from present study may provide a reference for the prediction of shear stiffness for headed studs and the elastic design of steel-concrete composite girder.