The Application of the Blast Preloading as a Potential Substitution or Companion for Surcharge and Vacuum in Weak Clay Treatment

The rapid developments of infrastructures, especially in far less developed areas or in the coastal regions, necessitates new technologies to elevate the efficiency of the existing systems. One of the obstacles in such areas is the existence of weak soils that are not suitable at all for construction. Soil treatment process, especially in such areas, is very time consuming and expensive. The common method for land reclamation consists of application of prefabricated vertical drains (PVDs), surcharge with or without vacuum preloading. Even by applying vacuum preloading, the time needed for compilation of the project is still considered long. In this literature a new method is introduced as a new preloading agent to accelerate the soil treatment process and decrease the cost and time required for the compilation of the reclamation process. Blast preloading might be a substitution or a companion for existing methods. First, a case history was introduced and verified using finite element modeling (FEM) that includes surcharge and vacuum preloading. Then the blast was applied to verified models, and the efficiency of it was investigated for every possible situation. It was shown that blast preloading has the potential to be used in soil treatment systems, as the required time was halved in many cases and the settlement increased from 20 to 50 percent, in comparison to cases without blast preloading. Even in cases in the absence of surcharge or vacuum, the blast preloading acts the same as surcharge or vacuum. Although it should be noted that it is still a preliminary investigation, more extensive lab and field tests are required for adoption of blast preloading as a new technique in soil treatment systems.