Design and laboratory verification of a physical model of sloping capillary barrier

Abstract

A physical model was designed and constructed to study the mechanisms associated with capillary barriers for slope stabilization purposes. Prior to construction of the model, various numerical analyses were conducted to determine the optimum dimensions and appropriate soil types for the materials of the capillary barrier model. This paper is divided into three sections: the first two sections are related to the design of the model and are to obtain the optimum dimensions of the model and to investigate the range of soil properties that are most suitable for experimental studies in the laboratory; and the last section is laboratory verification of the numerical analysis where the numerical simulation results are compared with the experimental data. Based on the numerical simulation results, the physical capillary barrier model was constructed using two different combinations of soils, namely silty sand over gravelly sand and fine sand over gravelly sand. From the comparison of the numerical results and experimental data, it was found that the numerical analysis was able to simulate the experiment on the physical capillary barrier model reasonably well.Key words: physical capillary barrier model, unsaturated water flow, numerical simulation, pore-water pressure, volumetric water content, slope stability, infiltration.