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渗透的密封。虽然这些聚合物片材本质上是不透水和不透气的，但不可避免地会出现缺陷——在施工过程中损坏或由于聚合物的缓慢劣化而在较长时间内损坏。有许多现有的方法来估计可能通过不同大小和形状的缺陷而产生的泄漏量——如果该缺陷位于用于基础密封的土工膜中，因此受到稳定状态或仅随时间缓慢变化的水的影响。土工膜越来越多地用于采矿废物的覆盖系统-覆盖面积可能达数百公顷。虽然有许多此类应用的成功案例，但目前还没有基于合理的方法或程序来估计这种土工膜覆盖（通常是倾斜的）中由于降水和径流导致这种缺陷上偶尔和高度瞬态的瞬态水力载荷的泄漏量。这项研究是与世界上最大的土工膜制造商加拿大公司Solmax合作进行的，将为设计工程师、矿业公司和监管机构提供在UofS独特的采矿废物覆盖系统测试设施中进行的全面试验数据。此外，这项研究将涉及创新的计算机建模工具，这将首次在此类土工工程问题中实现计算流体动力学。

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.