Experimental and numerical study on drainage characteristics of drainage pipes with porous foam filters

Abstract

The clogging of the geotextile wrapped on drainage pipes in geotechnical engineering is a common phenomenon, which affects projects’ safety seriously. However, there is no effective dredging measurement to address the clogging problem of drainage pipes wrapped with geotextile nowadays. Therefore, a drainage pipe with a replaceable porous-foam filter core is proposed. Through the indoor model test and numerical simulation, the drainage characteristics, including drainage capacity and drainage path of drainage pipes with porous foam filter core (hereinafter referred to as the ‘HDPP’), were studied. The size effect and influence factors of the drainage capacity of HDPP were discussed. The results showed that when the outer perforated pipes are same, the drainage capacity of the drainage pipe with reticulated polyurethane foam filter core (hereinafter referred to as the ‘HDPR’) was slightly higher than that of the drainage pipe wrapped with geotextiles (hereinafter referred to as the ‘HDPG’). The size of drainage pipe had a greater influence on the drainage flow than overall permeability coefficient of HDPR. The percentage of difference of flow can be selected to analyse the experimental statistics of different drainage pipes, because it is less sensitive to the change of model size.