Abstract
Soil pollution in mining areas has become a popular topic in the field of environment science. This study aims to solidify contaminated soil and reduce environmental pressure in mining areas. In view of the soil around a manganese tailing pond in Yunnan, China, fly ash was used as the geopolymer raw material to solidify the soil under the condition of alkali excitation, and the performance parameters of the solidified product were determined through mechanical and structural property tests. The former showed that the mechanical properties were gradually improved with the increase in distance between the soil and the mining center and the geopolymer content. Compressive and shearing strengths were up to 2159 and 205 kPa, respectively. XRD showed that the crystal phase significance of the soil decreased after the addition of geopolymer. SEM shows that the local density exists when the geopolymer content is low, and the solidified body forms a high-integrity multilayer structure when the geopolymer content is high. The infrared spectrum showed that the increase in geopolymer content is beneficial to the integrity of the structure and the improvement of performance. These results indicate that fly ash geopolymer (FAG) has good feasibility in the stabilization of trace metals in the soil of mining areas.
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This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U20A20320).
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SZ: conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, data curation, writing-original draft. YX: investigation, writing—review and editing. SL: investigation. YW: investigation, writing—review and editing. HL: funding acquisition. HH: funding acquisition, resources, writing—review and editing. MZ: validation, supervision, writing—review and editing.
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Zhao, S., Xiang, Y., Li, S. et al. Curing effects of fly ash-based geopolymer on soils around mining areas: properties and mechanisms. Environ Earth Sci 81, 455 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-022-10549-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-022-10549-9