Experimental observation and numerical simulation of cement grout penetration in discrete joints

This paper presents a comparison between experimental measurements and numerical estimations of penetration length of a cement grout injected in discrete joints. In the experiment, a joint was generated by planar acryl plates with a certain separation distance (; aperture) and was designed in such a way to vary the separation distances. Since a cement grout was used, the grout viscosity can be varied by controlling water-cement (W/C) ratios. Throughout these experiments, the influence of joint aperture, cement grout viscosity, and injection rate on a penetration length in a discrete joint was investigated. During the experiments, we also measured the time-dependent variation of grout viscosity due to a hardening process. The time-dependent viscosity was included in our numerical simulations as a function of elapsed time to demonstrate its impact on the estimation of penetration length. In the numerical simulations, Bingham fluid model that has been known to be applicable to a viscous cement material, was employed. We showed that the estimations by the current numerical approach were well comparable to the experimental measurements only in limited conditions of lower injection rates and smaller joint apertures. The difference between two approaches resulted from the facts that material separation (; bleeding) of cement grout, which was noticeable in higher injection rate and there could be a significant surface friction between the grout and joint planes, which are not included in the numerical simulations. Our numerical simulation, meanwhile, could well demonstrate that penetration length can be significantly over-estimated without considering a time-dependency of viscosity in a cement grout.