Electrokinetics in Geotechnical and Environmental Engineering
Preface
Idea
of publishing this book was originated during Professor Yan-feng Zhuang’s
visiting TU Freiberg in 2013. Originally, this book was to focus on
electro-osmotic consolidation only; after communicating with Professor Herbert
Klapperich and Professor Rafig Azzam, more content was added in.
Electrokinetic
phenomena of soil have been discovered for over 200 years. The electro-kinetic
phenomena include streaming potential, migration potential, electro-osmosis,
ion migration and electrophoresis. These phenomena show great potential in
geotechnical and environmental engineering. Lots of interesting researches have
been going on in this multidisciplinary area and results are very promising
both practically and theoretically. This book is to introduce some of them.
Novel
theoretical model for electro-osmotic consolidation, namely energy analysis
model, is presented in Chapter 2 and 3. Novel corrosion-proof electrode for
electro-osmotic consolidation, namely electro-kinetic geosynthetics (EKG), is
presented in Chapter 4, together with a showcase of its field application.
Chapter 6 presents a wide range of potential application of electrokinetics,
including dewatering, soil improvement, contaminated soil remediation,
contaminate barrier, waste water treatment, etc. Another showcase of field
application of electro-kinetics, which is ground stabilization using
electro-chemical injection, is presented in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 presents
studies on electro-osmosis reducing pull out resistance of sheet pile. Chapter
9 presents studies on thermos-osmosis induced by electric current generated
heat during electro-osmosis.
We
hope that this book will be inspiring to people who are interested in
electro-kinetic phenomena of soil. More interesting work will be carried out in
this research field and promising results will be applied in geotechnical and
environmental engineering.
The Editors
Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by DAAD and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC Grant No. 51109168 and No. 41472039). Thanks for this support and thanks to the authors contributed to this book, they are named in their corresponding chapters.
