The Dry Cracking of Cementitious Materials in the Eccentric Ring Test and the Concentric Ring Test

In order to reduce the randomness of the occurrence of cracks and shorten the long cracking time in the traditional concentric ring tests,the elliptical ring test,the square-eccentric ring test,and the eccentric ring test have been gradually developed.In this paper,we reported experiments on the eccentric ring test and concentric ring test that were carried out to compare the differences between the two methods.It is found that an increase in the water-cement ratio and the amount of aggregate will increase the cracking time.However,a more obvious cracking tendency of cement-based materials can be seen in the eccentric ring test.The correlation between humidity and strain was established by the use of the Kelvin equation and the Laplace equation so that the coupling analysis of humidity and strain during the drying process of cement-based materials could be determined.The experimental results show that the external surface humidity will decrease rapidly in the early stage of drying,while the interior areas of the cement-based materials decrease more slowly.The closer to the inner circle will decrease the humidity slowly.

Lateral displacement of silty clay under cement-fly ash-gravel pile-supported embankments: Analytical consideration and field evidence

Based on back analysis of lateral displacements measured in situ by using the analytical solution, a useful method for estimating stress concentration ratio of geosynthetic-reinforced and pile-supported(GRPS) embankments was proposed. In order to validate the proposed method, a full-scale high-speed railway embankment(HSRE) with four instrumented subsections over medium compressibility silty clay was constructed in three stages. The soil profile, construction procedure and monitoring of settlements and lateral displacements of the four test sections were described. The field deformation analysis results show that 1) the combined reinforcement of CFG piles and geosynthetic layer perform well in terms of reducing lateral displacements; 2) the development of lateral displacements lags behind the increase of fill load, which can be attributed to the vertical load transfer mechanism of the pile foundation; and 3) pile length has a dominant effect on the stress distribution proportion between piles and surrounding soils. The comparison between predicted and experimental results suggests that the proposed analytical solution and the back analysis-based method are capable of reasonably estimating the lateral deformation and the stress concentration ratio, respectively, if the appropriate soil elastic modulus is chosen.