Mechanical behaviour of stabilized contaminated sediments

Dredging of several millions cubic metre of sediments in ports and fairways to increase depth to big vessels and ships in Baltic sea in the near future needs high attention in handling many of these ‘hot-spots’ of highly contaminated sediments.

Sustainable Management of Contaminated Sediments (SMOCS) is an EU funded project with one of objectives of establishing guideline for sustainable management of these contaminated dredged sediments.

Stabilization Solidification (SS) of contaminated dredged sediments is one of the best techniques of handling these sediments for beneficial reuse. Stabilized contaminated dredged materials provide an alternative resource for construction materials; thus, geotechnical properties of stabilized contaminated sediments must then be well defined from sufficient laboratory and field tests to be able to determine adequately the complexity of material in constitutive model and field performance.

This research aims at finding out the performance of stabilized contaminated dredged sediments by use of field tests to validate and demonstrate treatment method under various conditions, also aims at finding methods and models to carry out numerical simulations of the behaviour of the stabilized volumes.

PhD student Gregory Makusa | Supervisor Sven Knutsson, Hans Mattsson