DANIEL SUAREZ RUIZ

Development of a prevention method for long-term settlement of embankment caused by mudstone weathering with coating of calcium carbonate

Ohtsuka Satoru

Weathering is the breaking down of rocks, soil, and minerals through contact with the Earth’s atmosphere, water and biological organism. Compared with erosion the weathering doesn’t involves movement of the rocks and minerals by agents as water, snow, wind, etc. weathering occurs on the same place, it has a little or no movement at all. 
For this research the main objective is we try to develop a technique to prevent long-term settlement due to mudstone weathering of existing embankments with a coating of Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) Precipitation. And experimentally investigate if the coating has a positive effect through a series of accelerated creep tests. 
The experimental program presented in this research will provide a reliable experimental data about the settlement of the crushed mudstone embankments treated by Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) coating, with the intent of enabling to continue the research on weathering countermeasures. This mentioned data will be obtained from six accelerated creep tests. The tests will be divided in two sets depending on the load use, in this case we used 20Kpa and 40Kpa, each set will have three tests depending on the treatment the specimens have (Without Coating, Three-Day Coating, and Four-Day Coating). Finally, to verify Simple Slaking Tests was performed, these tests will be without any load and we will have three types of specimens (Without Coating, Three-Day Coating, and Four-Day Coating). 
During the accelerated creep tests, we noticed a pattern during the cycle transition of drying to water immersion that caused a significant subsidence in the embankment which through the repetition of cycles gradually decreased. As we did the coating treatment to the mentioned specimens we noticed how this settlement was reduced. From this research we can say that the coating treatment is having a positive effect in reducing the weathering effect in the crushed mudstone embankments, and that a deeper investigation will be obviously need it to advance in this technique.