Effect of drying environment on engineering properties of an expansive soil and its microstructure

This paper investigates the effect of drying environment, i.e. temperature and relative humidity, on the engineering properties and microscopic pore size distribution of an expansive soil. The shrinkage tests under different drying temperatures and relative humidity are carried out in a constant climate chamber. Then, the undisturbed samples, prepared in different drying environment, are used for the triaxial tests and mercury intrusion tests. It is found that the drying environment has noticeable influence on the engineering properties of expansive soils and it can be characterized by the drying rate. The linear shrinkage and strength increase with the decrease of the drying rate. The non-uniform deformation tends to happen in the high drying rate, which subsequently furthers the development of cracks. In addition, during the drying process, the variation of pores mainly focuses on the inter-aggregate pores and inter-particle pores. The lower drying rate leads to larger variation of pore size distribution.

Analytical analysis of pullout resistance of the hydraulic expansion rockbolts on a frictionally coupled model

This paper proposes an empirical formula to estimate the shear strength of hydraulic expansion rockbolts.The field experimental results were obtained from eleven pullout tests to evaluate the results computed by the proposed formula.It was found that shear resistance of hydraulic expansion rockbolts significantly depends on the uniaxial compressive strength and elastic modulus of rock,with high correlation coefficients of 0.7651 and0.8587,respectively.The developed formula enables estimation of the maximum pullout load in an analytical process without pullout tests in the field.Conversely,due to the poor interlocking at the initial pullout load,the measured displacements were higher than the estimated ones.To reduce the interlocking effects between bolt and rock,we recommend preloading of 29.4 kN.Preload allows reducing the distance between the measured and estimated displacement and making two load-displacement curves practically identical with marginal differences of 1.1 to 1.5 mm at the maximum pullout load.

Effect of Solid Solution Treatment on Microstructure of Fe-Ni Based High Strength Low Thermal Expansion Alloy

The influence of solid solution treatments on the dissolution of carbides precipitates,the grain size,and the hardness of high strength low expansion alloy were investigated through XRD analysis,microstructure observations,and theoretical computation.It was seen that most primary Mo2C type carbide band dissolved in a temperature range of 1 100-1 150 ℃.When the temperature was over 1 200 ℃,the grain size increased remarkably,which led to the reduction of hardness.

Comparison of short-term and long-term performances for polymer-stabilized sand and clay

A series of tests were carried out on sulfate rich, high-plasticity clay and poorly-graded natural sand to study the effectiveness of a methylene diphenyl diisocyanate based liquid polymer soil stabilizer in improving the unconfined compressive strength （UCS） of freshly stabilized soils and aged sand specimens. The aged specimens were prepared by exposing the specimens to ultraviolet radiation, freeze-thaw, and wet-dry weathering. The polymer soil stabilizer also mitigated the swelling of the expansive clay. For clay, the observations indicated that the sequence of adding water and liquid polymer had great influence on the gained UGS of stabilized specimens. However, this was shown to be of little importance for sand. Furthermore, sand samples showed incremental gains in UCS when they were submerged in water. This increase was significant for up to 4 days of soaking in water after 4 days of ambient air curing. Conversely, the clay samples lost a large fraction of their UCS when soaked in water; however, their remaining strength was still considerable. The stabilized specimens showed acceptable endurance under weathering action, although sample yellowing due to ultraviolet radiation was evident on the surface of the specimens. Except for moisture susceptibility of the clay specimens, the results of this study suggested the liquid stabilizer could be successfully utilized to provide acceptable strength, durability and mitigated swelling.