Feasibility of wind-generated electricity for electrochemical treatment of landslides

Background and significance.

The research will explore the feasibility of renewable energy such as wind energy for sustainable electrochemical treatment of landslides.  Landslide is one of the major threats  to highway  and  railways transportation.  For example, the Ohio Department of Transportation  spends  over $40M per year to remedy problems caused by landslides. Many of these landslides occur due to low-strength soils and the occurrence of groundwater [1]. Electrochemical stabilization is a conventional method to strengthen clay soils with no mechanical disturbance to the slope.  However, it demands a large amount  of electricity that is traditionally provided by a mobile fuel-based generator. The high fuel consumption, pollutant gas release, and carbon dioxide emission severely restricts the usage of electrochemical stabilization techniques for the past decades [2]. We hypothesize that wind energy is a sustainable alternative to generate electricity for electrochemical treatment of landslides.  The project will test this hypothesis using the research-scale wind turbine and geotechnical centrifuge facility at CWRU (see Section C.5).

REU student involvement. 

REU students will analyze wind power generation data under various weather conditions, demonstrate the wind energy strategy in model-scale experiments at 1-g and 50-g, and evaluate the feasibility of wind energy application to electrochemical treatment of landslides.

References.

1. M. Brunetti, F. Guzzetti, and M. Rossi, "Probability distributions of landslide volumes," Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 179–188, 2009.

2. A. N. Alshawabkeh, T. C. Sheahan, and X. Wu, "Coupling of electrochemical and mechanical processes  in soils under dc fields," Mechanics of Materials, vol. 36, no. 5-6, pp. 453–465, 2004.