Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Assessment Of Backfill Hydraulic Conductivity In An Instrumented Soil-Bentonite Cutoff Wall, Landon Barlow, Michael A. Malusis

Faculty Conference Papers and Presentations

The objective of this paper is to present a comparison of measured hydraulic conductivities (k) for soil-bentonite (SB) backfill within a 60-m-long section of a 200-m-long, 7-m-deep cutoff wall constructed and instrumented for studying SB backfill properties and variability at the field scale. Backfill k was measured using flexible-wall tests (70-mm diameter) on remolded specimens prepared from surface grab samples collected during construction; flexible-wall tests on undisturbed specimens collected from the wall; larger-scale rigid-wall tests (150-mm diameter) on remolded specimens prepared from grab samples; and slug tests conducted within the wall. Applied effective stresses in the laboratory tests …