Environmental Science and Pollution Research

, Volume 24, Issue 15, pp 13561–13575 | Cite as

Estimation of heavy metal-contaminated soils’ mechanical characteristics using electrical resistivity

  • Ya Chu
  • Songyu Liu
  • Fei Wang
  • Guojun Cai
  • Hanliang Bian
Research Article
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

Under the process of urbanization in China, more and more attention has been paid to the reuse of heavy metal-contaminated sites. The shear characteristics of heavy metal-contaminated soils are investigated by electrical detection in this paper. Three metal ions (Zn2+, Cd2+, and Pb2+) were used, the metal concentrations of which are 50, 166.67, 500, 1666.67, and 5000 mg/kg, respectively. Direct shear tests were used to investigate the influence of heavy metal ions on the shear characters of soil samples. It is found that with the addition of heavy metal ions, the shear strength, cohesion, and friction angle of contaminated soils are higher than the control samples. The higher concentration of heavy metal ions penetrated in soils, the higher these engineering characteristics of contaminated soils observed. In addition, an electrical resistivity detection machine is used to evaluate the shear characteristics of contaminated soils. The electrical resistivity test results show that there is a decreasing tendency of resistivity with the increase of heavy metal ion concentrations in soils. Compared with the electrical resistivity and the shear characteristics of metal-contaminated soils, it is found that, under fixed compactness and saturation, shear strength of metal-contaminated soils decreased with the increase of resistivity. A basic linear relationship between C/log(N + 10) and resistivity can be observed, and there is a basic linear relationship between φ/log(N + 10) and resistivity. Besides, a comparison of the measured and predicted shear characteristics shows a high accuracy, indicating that the resistivity can be used to evaluate the shear characteristics of heavy metal contaminated soils.

Keywords

Heavy metal-contaminated soils Electrical resistivity Shear characteristics Laboratory investigations 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express acknowledgment to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Majority of the work presented in this paper was funded by the Key Project of Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41330641), the “Twelfth Five-Year” National Science and Technology Support Plan (Grant No. 2012BAJ01B02), and the Research Innovation Project of Ordinary University Graduate Student of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. KYLX15_0140).

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Ya Chu
    • 1
  • Songyu Liu
    • 1
  • Fei Wang
    • 1
  • Guojun Cai
    • 1
  • Hanliang Bian
    • 1
  1. 1.Institute of Geotechnical EngineeringSoutheast UniversityNanjingChina

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