The need to drain and strengthen soils arises in many practical problems. This is done to strengthen the beds and foundations of buildings, create anti-seepage curtains, lower the water table in the soils, strengthen and stabilize the soils to provide stability to slopes during construction in pits, quarries, trenches, slide-prone sections, etc.Existing technologies for the strengthening of soils, which are based on the impregnation or injection of liquid stabilizing grouts via holes-injectors, make it possible to solve numerous problems encountered in practice when the filtration coefficient K f = 0.5-400 m/day [1]. For lower K f values, difficulties of a principal character arise during implementation of hydraulic methods.In that case, the problem can be solved by the electro-osmotic method, which is based on the movement of moisture in a porous-capillary medium under the action of a permanent electric field. Direct-or unipolar-pulsed-current devices, which are connected to a system of anodic and cathodic electrodes, are employed here.As with filtration, an equation of the formis used to describe the electro-osmotic movement of liquid in a porous-capillary medium, where v E is the travel speed of the liquid in m/day, K E is the coefficient of electroosmosis in m 2 /(V day), and E is the intensity of the electric field in V/m (E = − gradU, and U is the electric potential in V). Electroosmosis was exposed in Russia as early as 1809 by Professor Rouss [2]. In the 1940s and 50s, electro-osmotic methods also came under active development in the Soviet Union [3,4]. The first K E measurements were taken by Casagrande [5].The effectiveness of the proposed method, which makes it possible to assign basic parameters of the effect on the soil (electrode-arrangement, dimensions, voltages of supply sources, treatment conditions, etc.) with greater reliability, is demonstrated.
