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

几十年来，土工膜一直被用来为泻湖和垃圾填埋场的底部提供不透水的围堵。虽然这些聚合物板材基本上不透气和水，但不可避免地会出现缺陷--在施工过程中或由于聚合物非常缓慢的降解而在较长时间内受到损坏。 有许多现有的方法可以估计不同大小和形状的缺陷可能导致的泄漏量--如果缺陷是在用于底部围护的土工膜中，因此受到稳定状态或随时间变化缓慢的积水的影响。 土工膜越来越多地用于覆盖采矿废物的系统--覆盖面积可能达数百公顷的区域。虽然有许多此类应用的成功案例，但目前还没有合理的方法或程序来估计这种土工膜覆盖层(通常是倾斜的)中因降水和径流而产生的渗漏量，这些缺陷会导致偶尔在这种缺陷上产生高度瞬变的水力荷载。 这项研究将与世界上最大的土工膜制造商、加拿大公司Solmax合作，为设计工程师、矿业公司和监管机构提供UofS独特的采矿废物覆盖系统测试设施的全尺寸试验数据。此外，这项研究将涉及创新的计算机建模工具，TAT将首次在此类岩土工程问题中实施计算流体动力学。

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.