ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Built Environ.
Sec. Geotechnical Engineering
Study on the interaction mechanism between the contra-rotational shear deep soil mixing drilling tool and the soil
Provisionally accepted
- 1MCC Group Central Research Institute of Building and Construction Co Ltd, Beijing, China
- 2ZheJiang Kunde Innovate Geotechnical Engineering CO. LTD., Ningbo, China
- 3Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin, China
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Deep soil mixing (DSM) piles are established for soft soil stabilization, yet the internal mechanism by which drilling tools achieve complete soil-cement homogenization remains unclear, hindering precise quality control in column formation. In this paper, a new type of contra-rotational shear deep soil mixing (CS-DSM) drilling tool was proposed and the detailed design information was thoroughly introduced. The discrete element modeling method was applied to establish a coupling model of CS-DSM drilling tool and soil verified by a laboratory model experiment. Soil particle moving path analysis quantified mixing dynamics during drilling-down and drilling-up phases. The results explained the internal mechanism that the soil particles could be fully sheared, stirred, and mixed in the horizontal and vertical directions to form a uniform soil cement column. The average VC of particle X1-X3 was 1.9 times larger than that of particles Y1-Y3, which indicated that soil particles along the x axis and y axis exhibited distinct moving patterns. The mixing efficiency during drilling-down and drilling-up was quite different, and the VC during the drilling-down process could be 146.7 times larger than that during the drilling-up process. In practice, reducing drilling speed or increasing rotational velocity during drilling-down enhances CS-DSM pile quality under identical conditions.
Keywords: Deep soil mixing pile, CS-DSM drilling tool, Discrete element simulation, Soil moving path, Interaction mechanism
Received: 21 Oct 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xue, Liu, Fang, Xiong and Wu. 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: Kun Wu, k_wu@cauc.edu.cn
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