The use of lime, cement and other curing agents to strengthen weak foundations has a long history. Ancient Egypt used lime, plaster and sand to strengthen the foundations of the Great Pyramid and the banks of the Nile River. Ancient India also used lime and clay to build dams. In the ancient Roman Empire, residents of the city of Naples used a large amount of locally accumulated volcanic ash mixed with varying proportions of quicklime to make a curing agent called Roman cement, which was the prototype of pozzolanic cement that has been widely used in recent years. This technology of making cement was widely used in European countries by the 18th century.
Before the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, our country used lime, clay and sand mixed into three-component soil to build post roads. Fasao, Shunyi County, Beijing: The purity and degree of calcination of the lime found in Han tombs are the same as modern lime. The Great Wall and Thousand Miles of Embankments built during the Qin Shi Huang era were all constructed of earth materials reinforced with lime. In modern times, in 1824, the British Aspigen first produced and patented Portland cement. In 1885, he filed a patent application in Germany for using Portland cement as a grouting material. Japan also produced pozzolanic cement in 1875. In 1915, cement grouting was used to stop water in the shaft excavation project of Matsushima Coal Mine in Nagasaki Prefecture. In 1917, the United States began to use cement mixed with clay as the base of roads. In 1920, lime was mixed with clay as the roadbed. The reinforcing effect of lime soil on the base of the Texas Highway built in 1945 is still recognized by people today.
In the above-mentioned engineering examples, cement and lime are mainly used to treat the surface layer of the foundation, such as treating the roadbed of highways and airport runways, treating frost heaving soil, and stabilizing slopes. In the 1960s, Japan and Sweden respectively developed and successfully developed a method for reinforcing deep soft soil - the deep mixing method. It can be used to treat river alluvial soft soil deep underground, extremely soft sedimentary soil in lakes, swamps and seabeds, ultra-soft fill soil piled on both sides of dredged channels, and even newly deposited silt. It generally uses cement or lime as the curing agent.