ABSTRACT
Electro-osmosis was discovered more than 200 years ago. Quite a lot of phenomena discovered in that early stage of research are still attractive up to now. It seemed that research on electro-osmosis had been suspended for a while since 1950s~1970s. It may be because both mechanism and engineering application of electro-osmosis are very complicated. However, in the past decade, there were quite a lot of breakthroughs on electro-osmosis technique. One among those was Electrokinetic Geosynthetics (EKG), a new category of geosynthetics which provides corrosion proof electrode; another one was smart DC power supply. To some extent, these breakthroughs make large scale application of electro-osmosis possible. They tackle the challenge of power demand and energy consumption not only for electro-osmosis but also for all electrokinetic related techniques in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering and these techniques are still evolving. This paper presents latest progresses on EKG and its application in large scale electro-osmotic dewatering and consolidation. Novel numerical modeling based on energy level gradient theory was carried out to model the field test of electro-osmotic consolidation using EKG. Comparison between calculated results and field test results is used for validation and further improvement of the numerical modelling program. The energy level gradient theory is a novel constitutive model that may help understanding of not only consolidation issue but also mechanism of unsaturated soil. Research presented in this paper is interdisciplinary and encouraging for further research.
