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Self-repair of cracks and defects in clay: a review of evidence, mechanisms, theories and nomenclature

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Abstract

Clay minerals and clayey soils have been extensively researched over the last century leading to a rich and still evolving corpus of knowledge on clay chemistry, microstructure and macroscopic behaviour. Clay has the ability, under certain conditions, to spontaneously repair its cracks. However, despite ample evidence, clay self-repair remains understudied and under-theorised. For example, the majority of experimental studies discussing clay self-repair infer its existence from changes to macroscopic properties assumed to be caused by self-repair, and only a small number of studies have attempted to observe self-repair directly. This paper reviews the literature on clay self-repair. First, it situates clay self-repair within the broader context of self-repairing material. Next, autogenous self-repair of clay, under wet-dry cycles, freeze–thaw cycles and deep-ground consolidation, is presented focusing on evidence, driving mechanisms and key variables of influence. Next, theories of clay self-repair proposed in the literature are discussed, highlighting their scope and limitations, as well as the extent to which they have been validated by experimental observations. Key gaps in current knowledge of clay self-repair are highlighted and ways in which they can be addressed in future research are proposed. Finally, a nomenclature distinguishing between different kinds of clay self-repair is proposed based on eight different attributes.

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Notes

  1. No clear-cut distinction exists between fracturing and fissuring; however, in this paper, we take fracturing to refer to a pattern of large and spaced-out cracks, while fissuring indicates a denser configuration of smaller and narrower cracks; we will use the term “cracking” when referring generically to both fracturing and fissuring.

  2. ‘Clay minerals’ are chemically defined compounds belonging to one of several clay mineral groups such as kaolinite, illite, vermiculite and smectite, which are found in soils; ‘clayey soils’ are defined differently by different soil classification systems but, in this paper, we generally understand them to be soil containing significant amounts of clay minerals; ‘clay materials’ are industrially manufactured/processed substances that contain refined forms of clay minerals for specific applications such as china clay (kaolinite) or bentonite for waste barrier systems (montmorillonite).

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge that research conducted for this paper, as well as experimental and theoretical research investigations by the authors, reported in this paper, have been funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP170104192. Imaging for the research has been carried out at the Sydney Microscopy and Microanalysis (SMM) of the University of Sydney. We thank PhD candidate Sepideh Taheri for her help in producing figure 3.

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  1. School of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Abbas El-Zein, David Airey, Gwénaëlle Proust, Daniel Dias-da-Costa, Yifei Gao, Yixiang Gan & Shunzhi Chen

  2. Alliance Geotechnical, 8-10 Welder Road, Seven Hills, NSW, 2147, Australia

    Bowei Yu

  3. School of Engineering, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Golnaz Alipour Esgandani

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El-Zein, A., Airey, D., Yu, B. et al. Self-repair of cracks and defects in clay: a review of evidence, mechanisms, theories and nomenclature. Acta Geotech. 16, 3741–3760 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-021-01382-8

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