Effect of Electro-kinetic Consolidation on Fine Grained Dredged Sediments

The management of the huge amount of dredged sediments is an important issue to be solved worldwide, and dewatering is by far the most critical step when fine grained sediments are involved. Different technologies have been proposed in time to speed up the process. Even though electro-kinetic treatment is in principle one of them, it has not been implemented yet at an industrial scale, and only few trial applications are known. For such a reason, a multidisciplinary research activity is ongoing at the University of Napoli Federico II in the framework of the EU commitment ROSE with the aim to analyse the effectiveness and feasibility of such a technology from the lab to the site scale. In this paper, some evidences stemming from lab tests are presented. The results indicate that the application of low voltages improves the mechanical behaviour of the tested soil. In this case, however, the improvement is due more to a change in microstructure than to a decrease in void ratio.