Rheological Properties of Liquid and Particle Stabilized Foam

In Earth-Pressure-Balance (EPB) tunnelling the excavated ground is used as face support medium to prevent surface settlements. In general, the excavated ground (e.g. for cohesionless soils) does not exhibit suitable conditions to support the tunnelling face. This technical challenge can be solved by adding conditioning agents that are mainly foams. In order to physically understand the rheological properties of the (added) liquid foam and the foam-soil (foam-particle) mixture and to comprehend its influence on the soil, advanced rheological investigations are necessary. Therefore, rheological experiments such as flow curve tests have been performed to determine the effective yield stress. Since the morphology, i.e. the microstructure of the foam accounts for effective rheological properties, size, shape and distribution of the cells of the foam and particle-laden foam were characterized in detail applying imaging techniques. In order to perform the above mentioned experiments, polymer-stabilised shaving foam seems to be a good replacement of tunnelling foam and suitable for laboratory tests due to its time stability, characteristic length scales of the microstructure and accessibility. Glass beads (of different diameter and volume fractions, i.e. specific surface areas) are used to investigate the effective material behaviour of foam-particle mixtures. The experimental results are compared with yield stress models of modified Herschel-Bulkley-Papanastasiou type.