Lecturers from Civil Engineering Department win the Rashid Bin Humaid Award for Culture and Science
Prof. Dr. Mohammed Youssef Fattah and Sinan Ahmed Al-Haddad from Civil Engineering Department at the University of Technology won Rashid Bin Humaid Award for Culture and Science for their tagged paper “Enhancing the swelling behavior of bentonite sand mixture used in clay linings".
In conjunction with Acer Hassan Saber and Dr. Mahmoud Diab Ahmed from the University of Baghdad, on the Rashid bin Humaid Prize for Culture and Science in its thirty-eighth session for the year 2021
They received an incentive prize of 7,500 dirhams
The winning research was devoted to a study on the clay lining, which is an important barrier to control the intrusion of groundwater into landfill facilities and to prevent the intrusion of pollutants into the surrounding environment. In this study, extrusion (a mixture of bentonite and sand) and non-bulging soil (kaolin) were used for clay linings. They were tested at different moisture contents and dry densities selected from the compressibility curve to verify the swell behavior of the soil under different degrees of saturation. In order to make a comparison, low and high plastic soils were used. Bentonite was mixed with sand (B - S) in a ratio of 1:4 (80% bentonite and 20% sand) by dry weight. (Kaolin) has also been used as a soil of low plasticity and non-bulging. Bentonite bulge is treated as a clay lining by mixing with sand. It was found that a mixture of bentonite and sand could provide a suitable material for use in clay linings in landfills. The swelling relationship with time is shown as a double peak curve which is attributed to the effect of the higher density of the soil, which eventually leads to the expansion of the microstructure. This mechanism reduces the overall structural void ratio while increasing the precise structural void ratio. Because of the hydration phase, the uptake into the soil decreases with higher soil moisture content. Another explanation for the reduced suction is that when soil swells under wetting, the contact forces between particles decrease, allowing the particles to drift away from each other.
Key words: soil swelling, unsaturated, bentonite, clay lining, swelling, time.
