The material composition and binding water characteristics of marine soft soils in Shenzhen.

Marine soft soils in the Shenzhen area show large foundation settlement and poor engineering properties after construction. To investigate the mechanism, we quantitatively analyzed the mineral composition and bound water characteristics by using X-ray diffraction and thermogravimetric tests. The results show that the bound water content of the as-built clay is about 3%, while the bound water content of the fine-grained clay sample is about 3.5%; The temperature required to completely remove the bound water is higher when the bound water content is higher. It indicates that soft soils with high clay mineral content tend to have high bound water content, which also leads to poor engineering properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]