Laboratory Study on the Hydraulic Conductivity and Pore Pressure of Sand-Silt Mixtures

The hydraulic conductivity plays a major role on the excess pore pressure generation during monotonic and cyclic loading of granular soils with fines. This paper aims to determine how much the hydraulic conductivity and pore pressure response of the sand-silt mixtures are affected by the percentage of fines and void ratio of the soil. The results of flexible wall permeameter and undrained monotonic triaxial tests performed on samples reconstituted from Chlef River sand with 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50% nonplastic silt at an effective confining stress of 100 kPa and two relative densities (D_r = 20, and 91%) are presented and discussed. It was found that the pore pressure increases linearly with the increase of the fines content and logarithmically with the increase of the intergranular void ratio. The results obtained from this study reveal that the saturated hydraulic conductivity (k) of the sand mixed with 50% low plastic fines can be, on average, four orders of magnitude smaller than that of the clean sand. The results show also that the hydraulic conductivity decreases hyperbolically with the increase of the fines content and the intergranular void ratio.     

Petrology of the Skien basaltic rocks,southwestern Oslo Region,Norway

The pile of Permian continental basaltic rocks near Skien has a minimum thickness of 1 500 m, dipping 40^g towards NE, consisting of several thin lava flows. Most flows are porphyric, though both tuffs and aphyric flows occur to a lesser extent. Amygdules are abundant and a characteristic feature. The flows in the lower 2/3 of the basalt pile are mainly classified as melanite-ankaramite; some in the middle part as melanite-nephelinite; and the upper 1/3 of the flows as basanite. The basaltic rocks evolved from an assumed olivine-nephelinitic magma at great depths principally by clinopyroxene crystal fractionation accompanied by later olivine and maybe melilite reactions at moderate pressure in minor shallower magma chambers.     

A Method for Installing Piezometers in Large Cobble Bed Rivers

An impact drive point method is described for emplacing piezometers in a cobble river bottom where this has previously been difficult without the use of drilling rigs. To force the drive point piezometers through coble, the vibrational impact of an air-powered hammer was carried directly to the drive point by the use of an internal drive rod. After insertion to depth, the drive rod was removed from the lower portion of the piezometer and a standpipe was added to extend the piezometer above the river level. Piezometers installed in this way have permitted water quality analysis and dynamic measurement of vertical potentials in cobble sediments ranging in size from 2.5 to >30 cm and the method has been successfully used in the Columbia River, USA, and Töss River, Switzerland. This innovative method provides information on the hydrodynamics of pore water in highly permeable, cobble deposits that are common in high-energy river and lake bottoms. Piezometers installed using the internal drive rod method facilitate the assessment of the temporal and spatial dynamics of recharge and discharge at the ground water/surface water interface and analyses of the ecological connectivity between the hyporheic zone and surface water of rivers and streams. This information will lead to improved management decisions related to our nation's ground water and surface water supplies.     

A comment on determining the induced magnetic field in bodies of arbitrary shape

Summary The authors prove that the solution of Laplace's equation under Neumann's boundary conditions can be transformed to an advantage into determining the field which is generated by charges, induced by the external field at surfaces of discontinuity.     

Mass and gas profiles in A1689: joint X-ray and lensing analysis

We carry out a comprehensive joint analysis of high-quality HST /ACS and Chandra measurements of A1689, from which we derive mass, temperature, X-ray emission and abundance profiles. The X-ray emission is smooth and symmetric, and the lensing mass is centrally concentrated indicating a relaxed cluster. Assuming hydrostatic equilibrium we deduce a 3D mass profile that agrees simultaneously with both the lensing and X-ray measurements. However, the projected temperature profile predicted with this 3D mass profile exceeds the observed temperature by ∼30 per cent at all radii, a level of discrepancy comparable to the level found for other relaxed clusters. This result may support recent suggestions from hydrodynamical simulations that denser, more X-ray luminous small-scale structure can bias observed temperature measurements downward at about the same (∼30 per cent) level. We determine the gas entropy at  0.1 r _vir  (where r _vir is the virial radius) to be ∼800 keV cm², as expected for a high-temperature cluster, but its profile at  >0.1 r _vir  has a power-law form with index ∼0.8, considerably shallower than the ∼1.1 index advocated by theoretical studies and simulations. Moreover, if a constant entropy 'floor' exists at all, then it is within a small region in the inner core,   r < 0.02 r _vir  , in accord with previous theoretical studies of massive clusters.