Experimental study on penetration of bentonite grout through granular soils

Abstract

Permeation grouting using bentonite grouts is one of the effective methods to improve the engineering properties of granular soils. However, the low penetrability of bentonite grouts into soils limits their practical application in permeation grouting. This study presents a new approach to control the penetration length of bentonite grouts through granular soils using an ionic additive, sodium pyrophosphate (SPP). It is hypothesized that the chemical modification changes both rheological and physicochemical properties of the bentonite grout, and thus affects its penetration length through soils. The rheological properties (yield stress and apparent viscosity) of bentonite grouts with weight ratios (ratio of water to dry bentonite, W/B) of 19, 12.3, 9, and 7.3 were controlled by the addition of 1%–4% SPP by weight of dry bentonite. The bentonite grouts were also injected into sand columns prepared at various experimental conditions to evaluate the effect of each experimental parameter on their penetration lengths. The results show that the penetration length of bentonite grouts decreases with a decrease in W/B ratio and an increase in yield stress and apparent viscosity. Moreover, the penetration length increases with the increase of the normalized effective grain size and injection pressure, but the increase of fines content reduces the penetration length of the grouts. While the existing analytical equation produces good agreement with the measured penetration lengths for the grouts having high yield stress (>26 Pa), it significantly overestimates the penetration lengths of the SPP modified bentonite grouts due to filtration (especially, the grouts having low yield stress and low W/B ratios). Therefore, a new empirical correlation is proposed to predict the penetration length of the bentonite grouts based on filtration and rheological blocking.