Quantification of leakage through defects in geomembrane cover systems for mining waste

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Geomembranes have been used to provide impermeable containment for the base of lagoons and landfills for decades. While these polymer sheets are essentially impermeable to gasses and water, it is inevitable that defects arise - from damage during construction or over a longer time period as a result of the very slow deterioration of the polymer. There are a number of existing methods to estimate the amount of leakage that may be expected through a defect of varying size and shape - if the defect is in a geomembrane used for basal containment and therefore subject to a ponding of water that is steady state or changes only slowly over time. Geomembranes are increasingly used in cover systems for mining wastes - over areas that may be hundreds of hectares in size. While there are many documented cases of successful such applications, there are not, at present, rationally-based methods or procedures to estimate the amount of leakage through defects in a such a geomembrane cover (typically sloped) from precipitation and runoff which leads to occasional and highly transient transient hydraulic loading over such a defect. This study, in partnership with Solmax, a Canadian company that is the world's largest geomembrane manufacturer, will provide design engineers, mining companies and regulators with data from full scale trials in a unique mining waste cover system testing facility at the UofS Further, this study will involve innovative computer modelling tools tat will for the first time implement computational fluid dynamics in this sort of geotechnical engineering problem.