Evaluating leakages through GMB/GCL composite liners considering random hole distributions in wrinkle networks

This paper presents a study on the development of a hydraulic connectivity analysis-based approach for evaluating leakage rates through geomembrane (GMB)-geosynthetic clay liner (GCL) composite liners considering random hole distributions in a GMB wrinkle network. An algorithm for hydraulic connectivity analysis was developed to find the hydraulically connected wrinkles from a wrinkle network, and an explicitly expressed criterion is proposed to define the hydraulic connection between wrinkles under the assumption that only one of the two adjacent wrinkles is possible to be damaged. A Monte Carlo simulation was used to evaluate the probability weighted average of the total leakage through multiple randomly distributed holes considering numerous possible combinations of locations of holes. The proposed approach was applied to typical examples reported in the literature and shows that it can objectively quantify the effect of the hydraulic properties of the liner and overburden pressure on the hydraulic connectivity between wrinkles in a wrinkle network. The proposed approach also allowed assessing the effect of different probabilities of various hole distributions on the calculated leakage, which was demonstrated to be non-negligible, especially when the hole frequency is small.