Salinity effects on soil shrinkage characteristic curves of fine-grained geomaterials

Abstract

Fine-grained clayey soils are prone to substantial volume changes during desiccation in response to the dynamics of their moisture regime, and are of critical importance in several geotechnical and geo- environmental engineering applications. As such, the complex interactions between the fraction of soil solids and the ionic pore fluid play a critical role in governing such volume changes, and have been the focus in studies dealing with marine geotechnology, mine-tailing ponds, engineered barrier systems, etc. With this in mind, the present investigation evaluates the volume changes and accompanying densification from a saturated slurry state to a constant volume state of a reference fine-grained geomaterial, kaolin, subjected to evaporative dewatering. For this purpose, several parametric studies involving determination of soil shrinkage characteristic curves (SSCCs) of kaolin under the influence of varied salt constituents and concentrations of pore fluid are performed. Furthermore, a critical assessment of SSCCs depicting progressive shrinkage and volume change behaviour of geomaterials is provided, followed by the analysis of experimentally obtained SSCCs of the kaolin to explore the impacts of pore fluid salinity. Moreover, the SSCCs are parameterised with a predictive model and the fitting parameters are used to quantitatively demonstrate the salinity-dependent volume change response of a representative fine-grained porous system.