John McKinley

CHEMICAL ANALYSIS OF CONTAMINATED SOIL STRENGTHENED BY THE ADDITION OF LIME

Abstract Strengthening of contaminated materials using inorganic cementitious agents is becoming more widely used in the UK. The method has particular advantages for bulk fill operations such as highway earthworks. Research has been done into the chemical characteristics of leachates and leached solid samples from a study into the long-term durability of a lime strengthened silt/pfa mixture amended with sewage sludge. This involved determinations of chemical composition and mineralogy, and geochemical modelling using Minteqa2 . None of the heavy metals tested is present in the leachate at a concentration likely to pose a significant environmental threat, although some were present to a higher degree than expected based on the inorganic chemistry. This is ascribed to complexation of the heavy metals with dissolved organic matter.

Coupled consolidation of a solid, infinite cylinder using a Terzaghi formulation

Abstract Axisymmetric consolidation is a classical boundary value problem for geotechnical engineers. Under some circumstances an analysis in which the changes in pore pressure, effective stress and displacement can be uncoupled from each other is sufficient, leading to a Terzaghi formulation of the axisymmetric consolidation equation in terms of the pore pressure. However, representation of the Mandel–Cryer effect usually requires more complex, coupled, Biot formulations. A new coupled formulation for the plane strain, axisymmetric consolidation problem is presented for small, linear elastic deformations. A single, easily evaluated parameter couples changes in pore pressure to changes in effective stress, and the resulting differential equation for pore pressure dissipation is very similar to Terzaghis classic formulation. The governing equations are then solved using finite differences and the consolidation of a solid infinite cylinder analysed, calculating the variation with time and with radius of the excess pore pressure and the radial displacement. Comparison with a previously published semi-analytical solution indicates that the formulation successfully embodies the Mandel–Cryer effect.

Solving the advection–dispersion equation using the discrete puff particle method

Abstract A flexible, mass-conservative numerical technique for solving the advection–dispersion equation for miscible contaminant transport is presented. The method combines features of puff transport models from air pollution studies with features from the random walk particle method used in water resources studies, providing a deterministic time-marching algorithm which is independent of the grid Peclet number and scales from one to higher dimensions simply. The concentration field is discretised into a number of particles, each of which is treated as a point release which advects and disperses over the time interval. The dispersed puff is itself discretised into a spatial distribution of particles whose masses can be pre-calculated. Concentration within the simulation domain is then calculated from the mass distribution as an average over some small volume. Comparison with analytical solutions for a one-dimensional fixed-duration concentration pulse and for two-dimensional transport in an axisymmetric flow field indicate that the algorithm performs well. For a given level of accuracy the new method has lower computation times than the random walk particle method.