Effect of polymer on strength and permeability of marine clay

In this paper, a study on whether the use of polymer would affect the engineering properties of marine clay during and after the consolidation stage was carried out. A polymer, polyacrylamide (PAM) was used in this study. Unconfined compressive tests and permeability tests on PAM-treated soil were conducted. The testing results were compared with the results of untreated marine clay. The test results indicated that anionic PAM with 2.0 g/kg by dry weight dosage was the most effective for the sedimentation process of soil slurry with 200% water content. At this dosage, the volume of the slurry can be reduced by 29.3% within the first 2 hours in this study. The unconfined compressive strength of anionic PAM treated marine clay at 14 and 28 days were about 360% and 135% higher than that of untreated marine clay with the same curing time, respectively. However, the permeability reduced by an insignificant amount. A microstructural study was also carried out and the results show that after treatment, more edge-to-face contacts between soil particles were observed, which could be related to the increase in shear strength and the decrease in permeability of the soil.