Investigation of wax-based barite slurry and deposition for 3D printing landslide model

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Deposition-based 3D printing has been proposed as a novel method for building the landslide model, especially its porous slide zone, to accurately mimic equivalent material properties and porous structure, which has been not yet achieved by traditional the manual or semi-auto compacting method. As an initial attempt, this research firstly selects barite powder and its wax additive formula for 3D slurry deposition, manipulating the relationship between the stress field control and the porosity of forming materials. It finds that the binder additive formulation of liquid paraffin 3 wt.%, solid paraffin 12 wt.%, stearic acid 1.8 wt.%, palm wax 4.8 wt.% could provide best dispersion of barite powder for slurry deposition. The additive binder with over 20 wt.% enables the proper 3D slurry deposition process, proving the capability of build landslide model via layer-by-layer forming process. The well-dispersed stable barite slurry paste is able to provide better mechanical properties for 3D formed parts. The sintering of the various slurry specimens could reach compressive strength up to 2.7 MPa as well as offer the strength lower than 0.5 MPa, providing wide range of mechanical property. Besides, the removal of wax additive binder during the sintering process enables the formation of well-distributed micro pores, which could assist in mimicking the material structure of weak slip zone. Hence, this study has achieved a combined development of material formulation, 3D printing slurry deposition and sintering approach, showing great potential to achieve synchronous controlling of material properties such as stress and seepage field in the 3D printed landslide model.