Abstract
Swelling clays are found all over the world, and the damage caused to the infrastructure in swelling clay areas is estimated to be about 20 billion dollars annually in the United States. Compressibility and shear strength are critical properties of soils that are necessary for the design of infrastructure. Our group has shown that molecular interactions between clay and fluids have a dramatic impact on the macroscale properties of swelling clays. The permeability of the clay increases about 500,000 times when the permeating fluid in the Na-montmorillonite clay is changed from polar fluid water to low polar fluid. This change results from clay–fluid molecular interactions as well as the differences to the microstructure caused by these interactions. In the current work, the compression and shear strength of the clay interlayer is studied by changing the polarity of the fluid in the interlayer and applying compressive and shear stresses using steered molecular dynamics. The results show the strong influence of normal stress as well as fluid polarity on compressibility and shear response of the clay at the molecular scale. The results demonstrate that clay–fluid molecular interactions play a crucial role in the macroscopic compressibility and shear strength of swelling clays.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support of USDoT/Mountain-Plains Consortium/UGPTI under grant No. #69A3551747108. The authors also acknowledge Computationally Assisted Science and Technology (CCAST) for providing computational resources at North Dakota State University.
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Katti, D.R., Thapa, K.B., Faisal, H.M.N., Katti, K. (2021). Molecular Origin of Compressibility and Shear Strength of Swelling Clays. In: Barla, M., Di Donna, A., Sterpi, D. (eds) Challenges and Innovations in Geomechanics. IACMAG 2021. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 125. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64514-4_66
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