BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Built Environ.
Sec. Geotechnical Engineering
Volume 11 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2025.1662269
This article is part of the Research TopicRising Stars in Geotechnical Engineering: Volume 2View all 4 articles
Investigating Air Entrapment in Biocemented Composites for Geotechnical Ground Improvement
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Washington, Seattle, United States
- 2GeoEngineers Inc, Redmond, United States
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Biocementation is a biomediated ground improvement method that can improve the engineering behavior of granular soils through the precipitation of calcium carbonate minerals. Although cemented bonds and particle coatings generated from biocementation can enable large increases in soil initial shear stiffness, peak shear strength, and liquefaction resistance; emerging strategies such as soil desaturation have shown the ability of alternative mechanisms to enable large improvements in liquefaction behaviors. This article highlights outcomes from recent experiments which have investigated the potential of novel treatment processes to enable the generation and entrapment of gases within biocementation. We hypothesize that these entrapped gases may provide a secondary mechanism to improve soil undrained shearing behaviors by enabling the release of gases following cemented bond deterioration and related increases in pore fluid compressibility. Our study employs a series of batch experiments to identify new methods to both generate and entrap gasses within an organic polymer layer applied intermittently between biocementation treatments. Biocemented composites resulting from this work may enable large improvements in the environmental and financial efficacy of biocementation and the resilience of treated soils to extreme loading events.
Keywords: MICP, calcite, Geotechnical engineering, soil improvement, biocementation, Biomediated, Ground improvement
Received: 08 Jul 2025; Accepted: 06 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gomez, Martinez, Ribeiro and Tai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Michael G. Gomez, University of Washington, Seattle, United States
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