New insight into the additives in preparation and reduction of shield slurry

In the preparation of the slurry in the slurry shield (SSS) and subsequent reduction of the waste slurry produced by the slurry shield (WSSS), the additives in SSS improve the quality of filtration cake on the excavation surface, but they may also remain in WSSS, which have a negative impact on the reduction efficiency of WSSS. Therefore, it is valuable to establish the relationship between SSS and WSSS with additives as a link. Given this, this paper prepared WSSS with different dosages of additives and studied the influence of residual additives on the reduction. The residual additives made the reduction efficiency of WSSS worse, and the specific resistance to filtration increased by one to two orders of magnitude. The residual additives change the content of bound water or reduce the available sites of the soil particles that can be adsorbed by flocculants, leading to worse reduction results. To reduce the difficulty of reduction, combining polymer and bentonite as additives are recommended to prepare SSS. Polyaluminium chloride (PAC) acts by reducing bound water content through the interaction with residual bentonite, simultaneously augmenting PAM flocculation, which is recommended for reducing WSSS. This paper provides a reference for selecting materials used to prepare SSS and the subsequent reduction of WSSS.