A Study on Pullout-Resistance Increase in Soil Nailing due to Pressurized Grouting

Pressurized grouting is a common technique in geotechnical engineering applications to increase the stiffness and strength of the ground mass and to fill boreholes or void space in a tunnel lining and so on. Recently, the pressurized grouting has been applied to a soil-nailing system which is widely used to improve slope stability. Because interaction between pressurized grouting paste and adjacent ground mass is complicated and difficult to analyze, the soil-nailing design has been empirically performed in most geotechnical applications. The purpose of this study is to analyze the ground behavior induced by pressurized grouting paste with the aid of laboratory model tests. The laboratory tests are carried out for four kinds of granitic residual soils. When injecting pressure is applied to grout, the pressure measured in the adjacent ground initially increases for a while, which behaves in the way of the membrane model. With the lapse of time, the pressure in the adjacent ground decreases down to a value of residual stress because a portion of water in the grouting paste seeps into the adjacent ground. The seepage can be indicated by the fact that the ratio of water/cement in the grouting paste has decreased from a initial value of 50% to around 30% during the test. The reduction of the W/C ratio should cause to harden the grouting paste and increase the stiffness of it, which restricts the rebound of out-moved ground into the original position, and thus increase the in-situ stress by approximately 20% of the injecting pressures. The measured radial deformation of the ground under pressure is in good agreement with the expansion of a cylindrical cavity estimated by the cavity expansion theory. In-situ test revealed that the pullout resistance of a soil nailing with pressurized grouting is about 36% larger than that with regular grouting, caused by grout radius increase, residual stress effect, and/or roughness increase.