Abstract
Hydraulic conductivity is one of the most variable and yet an essential parameter in environmental engineering, in estimation of contaminant travel time in soils and groundwater. Also, it is one of the most difficult parameters to determine, and directly affects the quantity of water that will flow. Hydraulic methods for estimation the hydraulic conductivity can be either laboratory methods or in-situ methods. This study presents five laboratory methods which can be used to estimate the hydraulic conductivity of soils: variable-head permeameter - Kamenski; simplified permeameter; constant-head Cromer permeameter, in two working configurations; constant-head permeameter connected to piezometric tubes and a variable-head permeameter. Although these methods require more labour than other available methods, e.g. the correlation methods, they are relatively fast and not expensive. For the porous material used in the experiments, the most accurate values of the hydraulic conductivities were obtained with the constant-head permeameter connected to piezometric tubes.
Highlights
The physical property which denotes the capacity of a material to allow water flow, in the presence of an applied hydraulic gradient, through pore spaces and fractures is the hydraulic conductivity [1].This property, noted K, is influenced by the density and viscosity of the fluid, the saturation degree and the permeability of the material
For the first design the values of hydraulic conductivity varied during the first experiment from 0.078 to 0.305 cm/min, with a mean value of 0.263 cm/min and during the second experiment from 0.217 to 0.37 cm/min, with a medium value of 0.272 cm/min
In order to analyse the results, the experimental methods were numbered from 1 to 14: 1 to 3 the three experiments using the variable-head permeameter Kamenski; 4 - simplified permeameter; 5 to the six experiments using constant-head Cromer permeameter; to 13 the three experiments using a constant-head permeameter connected to piezometric tubes and 14, the variable-head permeameter
Summary
The physical property which denotes the capacity of a material to allow water flow, in the presence of an applied hydraulic gradient, through pore spaces and fractures is the hydraulic conductivity [1]. This property, noted K, is influenced by the density and viscosity of the fluid, the saturation degree and the permeability of the material. The correlation methods estimate the K-value using a preset relationship with a soil property which is easy to determine (e.g. texture) and have the major advantage of being simpler and quicker than direct determination of the hydraulic conductivity [2,3].
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