Adhesion behavior and deposition morphology of cement grout flowing through granular materials

The liquid distribution of unsaturated wet granular media composed of granular materials and Newtonian fluid has been in detail studied. However, when a granular material is mixed with a certain amount of Bingham fluid, the effect of rheological properties of Bingham fluid on the deposition morphologies is not clearly explored. In this study, the adhesion rules of fresh cement grout flowing through granular materials without considering the filtration effect is investigated, and the deposition morphologies of cement grout in random packing of spheres is observed with the help of X-ray microtomography device. The results show that the deposition mechanism of cement grout is significantly dependent on its yield stress. The cement grout spontaneously forms open structures with large liquid-air interface. The morphologies of cement grout within cemented granular materials vary with grout content. With the increase of the yield stress of cement grout, neighbouring smaller clusters gradually touch each other and coalesce into more complex structure, and the largest cluster can contain almost all the cement grout.

Automated summary

The deposition morphology of cement grout in granular materials is studied, and it is found that the morphology varies with the yield stress of the grout.