Electrokinetic treatment of clay soil - A baseline case study introduction

Although electrokinetic phenomena were relatively recently discovered, they have come a long way and even dominate certain sectors. However, they have rarely been utilized in the discipline of civil engineering. While the limited civil engineering applications are accompanied by inherent uncertainty and changing field conditions, laboratory applications that mitigate those challenges often suffer from conditions that differ substantially from real life engineering applications, thus making questionable the validity of extrapolating results from the laboratory to on-site projects. The work presented here aims to bridge that gap by conducting a laboratory experiment that reproduces - as closely as possible - the conditions that can be expected in civil engineering projects. To that end an experimental set-up is constructed that allows for electrokinetic treatment of clay soil and even though it facilitates constant monitoring of the desired parameters, it does not deviate substantially from how electrokinetic treatment would look like in an actual project.