Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Liang Cheng
What is Biocementation?
Where to use biocement in Geotechnical
engineering?
Some key factors
Future perspectives
2+
+ 22
(2 )2 + 2
23 + 2 + 22
24+ + 3 ()
23 + 2
24+ + 32
Road stabilisation
Erosion control
Dike stability
Liquefaction prevention
Cost-effective
Easy to operate
Predicable, reliable and reproducible outcomes
Cheap urease
resource
More effective
crystals
Uniformity
(b)
2.5
day 0
day 1
day 3
day 5
day 7
day 9
1.5
1
0.5
0
0
Coarse sand
50
100
150
200
250
300
Distance from surface of sand column (mm)
Fine sand
Cheng et al. (2016) under review
Bacterial cells
Crystals
Bacterial spores
Bacterial cells
(a)
(b)
Nucleation sites
Crystal growth vs Crystal nucleation
Crystal size
High amount
Low amount
4oC
Nucleation rate
Crystal growth rate
Solubility
25oC
50oC
100 m3 large scale trial: UCS ranging from 0.5 MPa to 12 Mpa (Van
Paassen et al. 2010).
60 L 3-D small scale trial: local strength variation larger than 300%.
(Cheng and Cord-Ruwisch, 2014)
X-Horizontal Width (mm)
Tow-meter column trial: UCS ranging
from 3500 to 300 kPa (Cheng
and Cord-Ruwsich, 2014)
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
450
MPa
Z-Vertical Depth (mm)
Sand column trial (cm): calcium carbonate with variation more than
40%) (Feng and Montoya (2015).
100
1.000
1.500
2.000
200
2.500
3.000
3.500
300
400
4.000
What is bioslurry?
Urease active pre-formed calcite crystals
Advantages:
Uniform urease activity distribution
Reproducible outcomes
High retention of urease activity
Against low salinity water flushing
Uniform Calcite precipitation
Disadvantages:
Requiring pre-mixing
Disturbing soil
Re-introducing urease activity is not feasible (unless in-situ regrowth)
Avoid clogging
Disadvantages
Poor bacterial fixation
Unpredictable bacteria distribution
Non-uniform cementation
CS
BC
Disadvantage
The mixture needs to be well controlled.
Uniformity
Strength
increases
withstrength
flushes
Urease activity
affects
UCS (kPa)
UCS
(kPa)
UCS(kPa)
4000
4000
1000
3500
3500
4Bottom
flushes section
3 flushes
3000
800
3000
2500
Top section
2500
600
2000
2000
1500
1500 400
1000
1000 200
500
500 0
0
0
1.25 U/mL 1.875 U/mL 3.75 U/mL 7.5 U/mL
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
Strainactivity
(%)
Urease
Strain (%)
Other
applications
than
Inhibited
by high other
Could
beground
used in high
improvement
concentration of
concentration of
cementation
solution
cementation
solution
Sustainable
and
green construction
materials
Can not treat
clay
Possible
Self-healing
construction
materials
Biocement
for wood protection
and treatment
Cheap
Expensive
Pollutants
Extensive removal
studies
Not fully understand
Nano materials (e.g. CdS (Zhu et al. 2016))
Bio-mineralization
Bio-calcification
Urease and
Urea
Ureolytic
bacteria
Nitrate, lactate,
CO2 gas, etc.
Urease enzyme