The presentation attached at the end of this post was from Colin Jones. (Refresh a few more times if the pptx is not shown properly. Either Google Doc viewer or Microsoft office viewer has some problems in some special zones of the Internet.) Some cases shown in the presentation are from us. It is an interesting and overlapping area to be explored and we have been in this area for more than 20 years. More and more novel and interesting topics in this area have been discovered and we keep on widen their application potential in different engineering areas.
PS: there was a news that the EK Co. was merged to the RSK. I went back several times to the EU but not to the UK again and it has been around 15 years. Hope to travel again when the pandemic ends.
Zhuang, Y.F., Zou,
W., Wang, Z., Tan, X., Hu, P., Hu, S., Yan, Y., Wang, Y., 2012. Electrically
conductive PVD. Chinese Patent. Grant Number: ZL201210197981.4.
The first field trial using E-board in China:
Zhuang, Y.F., Huang,
Y., Liu, F., Zou, W., Li, Z., 2014. Case study on hydraulic reclaimed sludge
consolidation using electrokinetic geosynthetics. In: 10th International Conference
on Geosynthetics. DGGT, Berlin, Germany.
After the field trial, it was found that power requirement, instead of energy consumption, is the biggest challenge for field application using electro-osmosis. And I believe this is the case for most applications using electrokinetic technique in Geo.
Zhuang, Y.F., 2015.
Challenges of electro-osmotic consolidation in large scale application. In:
Conference of Geosynthetics 2015. IFAI, Portland, Oregon, USA, pp. 447–449.
Therefore, I have been focusing on Smart DC Power Source and looking for a way to reduce both power requirement and energy consumption. Roll Polling Program seems to be a solution. It reduces the requirement of current intensity to 1/3; it also decreases the energy consumption to less than 1 kW⋅h/m3. Following contents are direct quote from the publication:
Zhuang, Y.F., 2021. Large scale soft ground consolidation using electrokinetic geosynthetics. Geotext. Geomembranes 49 (2021) 757–770.
This is a paper from Nature. There are a lot of researches as well as applications at micro scale level. In my early stage of research, I did most on macro scale about its application in civil engineering. Recently, I am interested in developing something that bridges mechanisms of micro and macro level. Let’s see how far we can move forward.
The following sample pages from the book “Ground Improvment Techniques” contain chapter of electro-osmosis. This book is provided by Prof. Arun Prasad. He contacted me a year ago about including part of my research work in this book. I am looking forward to further research work on electro-osmosis from Prof. Arun Prasad’s team in IIT (BHU).
It is the first time that I put on a post to say “Hey! Join
us, if you are interested in.”
We are doing amazing research here with incredible enthusiasm
and broad interests.
There are tons of reasons that people choose to do research; it could be a hobby, or to make a living, or any reason you name it, but my favourite reason is always that you love it. If you love your job, then you will do it with passion and happiness. 996 is never a problem only if you love it. (Well, it doesn’t mean 996 in our team…I never advocate that. See the photo, people played badminton; and we should do it more later on.)
My interests include (but not limited to)
1. Impact of electricity on clay minerals
By applying electric voltage on clay minerals, we look at
the variation of its mineral structure and engineering behaviours. This could
be a scientific research on clay mineral level (chemical & micro level); it
could also be linked to potential engineering application in the area of geotechnical
and geoenvironmental engineering.
2. Soil remediation and ground water treatment
This is a research area on removal of pollutants from
contaminated soil or protection of ground water. This research topic can be
linked to EK technique as well. And another possibility is to use Fe-rich clay
minerals as redox materials for ground water treatment.
3. Dewatering and consolidation
This topic is about removal of water from very fine-grained
soil, like sludge, slurry, clay, etc. These kinds of materials have very low
hydraulic conductivity, but electro-osmosis can be an effective method for dewatering
and consolidation of them. We are looking at the challenges of this EO technique
in large scale of application.
4. Geosynthetics
We are interested in application of geosynthetics.
1) Reinforcement, which is a very popular application for
decades and lots of people from academy and industry are doing it.
2) Filtration and drainage. This topic is related to
dewatering and consolidation. One of the special issues that we are especially
interested in is the clogging problem of geotextiles. There are lot of things
to do, include mechanism of clogging, update of manufacturing and design code,
invention of novel types of geotextiles.
3) One more thing about geosynthetics, which is special for
our research is EKG. This novel material presents a new category of
geosynthetic and I’ve been staying in this topic for over decade.
5. Unsaturated soil, constitutive model and numerical
modelling
We are carrying out this research partially also because of
EK technique. When applying EK technique, it is related to unsaturated soil and
suction. Therefore, we’ve been developing completely new constitutive model and
trying to apply it in suction measurement, EK design and also trying to develop
code for numerical modelling and software for EK design.
6. Mining, tailing, liquefaction, etc.
More researches that are related to my basic interests previously
mentioned are being explored, we will see more ideas and fantastic work coming
up.
“Soil Mechanics arrived at the borderline between science and art. I use the term “art” to indicate mental processes leading to satisfactory results without the assistance of step-for-step logical reasoning…To acquire competence in the field of earthwork engineering one must live with the soil. One must love it and observe its performance not only in the laboratory but also in the field, to become familiar with those of its manifold properties that are not disclosed by boring records…”
I believe that most information is somewhere on the internet; the question is if you can find it. This is part of a paper about the history of electro-osmosis, which was digitized by google. In ancient time, scientific discovery was communicated within scientists via correspondence, which is good, but rather impossible now. The latest news about coronavirus… Are those … working for helping people or just for publishing papers?
