State-of-the-Art Review on Engineering Uses of Calcium Phosphate Compounds: An Eco-Friendly Approach for Soil Improvement

Greenhouse gas emissions are a critical problem nowadays. The cement manufacturing sector alone accounts for 8% of all human-generated emissions, and as the world’s population grows and globalization intensifies, this sector will require significantly more resources. In order to fulfill the need of geomaterials for construction and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, conventional approaches to soil reinforcement need to be reconsidered. Calcium phosphate compounds (CPCs) are new materials that have only recently found their place in the soil reinforcement field. Its eco-friendly, non-toxic, reaction pathway is highly dependent on the pH of the medium and the concentration of components inside the solution. CPCs has advantages over the two most common environmental methods of soil reinforcement, microbial-induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) and enzyme induced carbonate precipitation (EICP); with CPCs, the ammonium problem can be neutralized and thus allowed to be applied in the field. In this review paper, the advantages and disadvantages of the engineering uses of CPCs for soil improvement have been discussed. Additionally, the process of how CPCs perform has been studied and an analysis of existing studies related to soil reinforcement by CPC implementation was conducted.