Research on Strength Degradation of Soil Solidified by Steel Slag Powder and Cement in Seawater Erosion

Abstract

Several problems exist in the use of cement to treat soft soils, such as high treatment cost, air pollution in the cement production process, possible groundwater contamination by cement in the ground, and so on. In this paper, steel slag powder is used to replace a portion of the cement to form a new curing agent. The soft soil is solidified by the agent and soaked in seawater. In order to simulate the seawater erosion environment, three kinds of ions that greatly influence solidified soil erosion in seawater were selected, and the strength degradation properties of solidified soil caused by a single ion were studied. Through physical and mechanical tests, the fluctuation of unconfined compressive strength (UCS) for each group under different conditions of seawater and distilled water curing conditions was obtained. The microscopic morphology of the solidified soil and the mineralogy difference in accordance with the erosion time were obtained via the X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) tests.