Modelling smear effect of vertical drains using a diameter reduction method

Vertical drains are used to accelerate consolidation of clays in ground improvement projects.Smear zones exist around these drains,where permeability is reduced due to soil disturbance caused by the installation process.Hansbo solution is widely used in practice to consider the effects of drain discharge capacity and smear on the consolidation process.In this study,a computationally efficient diameter reduction method(DRM)obtained from the Hansbo solution is proposed to consider the smear effect without the need to model the smear zone physically.Validated by analytical and numerical results,a diameter reduction factor is analytically derived to reduce the diameter of the drain,while achieving similar solutions of pore pressure dissipation profile as the classical full model of the smear zone and drain.With the DRM,the excess pore pressure u obtained from the reduced drain in the original un-disturbed soil zone is accurate enough for practical applications in numerical models.Such performance of DRM is independent of soil material property.Results also show equally accurate performance of DRM under conditions of multi-layered soils and coupled radial-vertical groundwater flow.

Microfocus small-angle X-ray scattering at SSRF BL16B1

Offering high-brilliance X-ray beams on micrometer length scales,the μSAXS at SSRF BL16 B1 has been established with a KB mirror system for studying small sample volumes,or probing microscopic morphologies.The SAXS minimum q value is 0.1 nm^-1 with a flux of 1.5×10^10 photons/s.Two position-resolved scanning experimental methods,STXM and CT,are combined with μSAXS.To improve the significant smearing effect in the horizontal direction,an effective and easy-to-use desmearing procedure for two-dimensional SAXS patterns based on blind deconvolution was developed,and the deblurring results demonstrate the good restoration effect for the defocused image.Finally,a bamboo sample was used in the SAXS-CT experiment to illustrate the performance of the μSAXS method.

Influence of energy bandwidth of pink beam on small angle X-ray scattering

Background Compared with the traditional monochromatic synchrotron radiation beam,a pink beam is a quasimonochromatic beam which can be obtained by screening a harmonic of the undulator.The energy bandwidth(E/E)of a pink beam is about 10−2.Despite the intensity gain from the quasi-monochromatic beam,the decrease in the energy resolution will lead the collected data to be smeared.Purpose To study the influence of the energy bandwidth on the small angle X-ray scattering(SAXS)by experiments and verify the feasibility of SAXS with a pink beam.Method Firstly,the influence of different energy bandwidths on SAXS has been studied by simulation and experiment.Then,TEM tests have been performed and compared with the experimental results.Result It has been shown that the scattering curves deviate slightly from the traditional monochromatic ones.This deviation does not influence the data processing for the maximum deviation of the results is just less than 2%.In return,the gain in the intensity(one to two orders of magnitude)makes the pink beam very important for the time-resolved SAXS.Further,the results of TEM and SAXS have shown an excellent agreement.Conclusion Thiswork proves that the pink beam could be used for SAXS directly without a desmearing procedure.Benefiting from the increase in the beam intensity,the exposure time can be greatly shortened,thus enhancing the utilization efficiency of the synchrotron radiation.