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Compression behavior of reconstituted soils mixed with bentonite for a cutoff wall in a landfill site

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Abstract

Soil-bentonite (SB) backfill is used extensively in cutoff walls at landfill sites; the walls are used as engineered geotechnical barriers for contaminant control. With increasing bentonite content, the coefficient of consolidation and hydraulic conductivity of the SB decrease. However, when the bentonite content is increased beyond a certain percentage, the hydraulic conductivity of the SB decreases very little. One of the aims of this paper is to introduce the concept of optimal bentonite content (OBC) for SB cutoff walls, in which the hydraulic conductivity (kh) is expected to be lower than 1 × 10−9 m/s. Additionally, the paper introduces a new index consolidation stress ratio, cvσ′, which is used to obtain the OBC. For this study, the initial water contents of the SB backfill material are selected to be 0.8, 1.0, and 1.2 times their corresponding liquid limits. The clayey soils are amended with different bentonite contents, 0, 5, 8, and 10% (by dry weight basis) for the oedometer tests. Then, piezocone penetration test (CPTU) is applied in SB cutoff wall at a landfill site in Jingjiang city, China. The results of the laboratory and field studies show that the introduction of a new index, cvσ′, is very useful for calculating the OBC and for evaluating the coefficient of consolidation and hydraulic conductivity of SB backfill. The advantage of SB backfill with OBC is that it can achieve the design requirement of very low hydraulic conductivity and improve the safety reserves.

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Acknowledgements

Majority of the work presented in this paper was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41672294) and the National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFC0800200).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210096, China

    Xuepeng Li, Guojun Cai & Songyu Liu

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA

    Anand J. Puppala

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  1. Xuepeng Li
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  2. Guojun Cai
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  3. Anand J. Puppala
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  4. Songyu Liu
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Correspondence to Guojun Cai.

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Li, X., Cai, G., Puppala, A.J. et al. Compression behavior of reconstituted soils mixed with bentonite for a cutoff wall in a landfill site. Environ Earth Sci 77, 390 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-018-7572-6

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