Decoupled Advection-Dispersion Method for Determining Wall Thickness of Slurry Trench Cutoff Walls
Publication: International Journal of Geomechanics
Volume 18, Issue 5
Abstract
Low-permeability slurry trench cutoff walls are commonly constructed as barriers for containment of subsurface point-source pollution or as part of seepage-control systems on contaminated sites. A method to estimate wall thickness in slurry wall design is proposed based on decoupling the advective and dispersive components of contaminant fluxes through the wall. The relative error of the result obtained by the proposed method compared with that by an analytical solution was found to increase as the ratio of the specified breakthrough exit concentration (c*) to the source concentration (c0) increased. For c*/c0 of less than 0.1, which covers common practical situations, the relative error was not greater than 4% and was always conservative, indicating that the proposed method provides sufficient accuracy for design. For a given breakthrough criterion (i.e., c*/c0), the relative error was low for the scenarios having either a low or high column Peclet number, where either dispersion or advection dominates the contaminant migration, respectively, and the relative error was high for the scenario having an intermediate column Peclet number, in which case the coupling effect of advective and dispersive migrations is relatively high.
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Acknowledgments
The financial support received from the National Natural Science Foundation of China by Grants 41672284 and 51378465, the Science Technology Department of Zhejiang Province by Grant 2016C31G2010015, and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Grant NE/L013908/1 is gratefully acknowledged.
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Published In
International Journal of Geomechanics
Volume 18 • Issue 5 • May 2018
Copyright
© 2018 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 10, 2017
Accepted: Nov 2, 2017
Published online: Feb 22, 2018
Published in print: May 1, 2018
Discussion open until: Jul 22, 2018
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