Abstract

No analytical solution exists for evaluating in-situ hydraulic conductivity of vertical cutoff walls by analyzing slug test results. Recently, an analytical solution to interpret slug tests has been proposed for a partially penetrated well in an aquifer. However, this analytical solution cannot be directly applied to the cutoff wall because the solution has been developed exclusively for an infinite aquifer instead of a narrow cutoff wall. To consider the cutoff wall boundary conditions, the analytical solution has been modified in this study to take into account the narrow boundaries by introducing the imaginary well theory. Two boundary conditions are considered according to the existence of filter cakes: constant head boundary and no flux boundary. Generalized steady-state shape factors are presented for each geometric condition, which can be used for evaluating the in-situ hydraulic conductivity of cutoff walls. The constant head boundary condition provides higher shape factors and no flux boundary condition provides lower shape factors than the infinite aquifer, which enables to adjust the in-situ hydraulic conductivity of the cutoff wall. The hydraulic conductivities calculated from the analytical solution in this paper give about 1.2~1.7 times higher than those from the Bouwer and Rice method, one of the semi-empirical formulas. Considering the compressibility of the backfill material, the analytical solution developed in this study was proved to correspond to the case of incompressible backfill materials.

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