Installation of a vertical slurry wall around an Italian quarry lake: complications arising and simulation of the effects on groundwater flow

Slurry walls are non-structural barriers that are constructed underground to impede groundwater flow or manage groundwater control problems. The study area is in the Piemonte plain (Italy), close to the River Po. Quarrying works carried out below the piezometric surface created two big quarry lakes. The local groundwater system is characterized by a lower semi-confined aquifer, which is overlain by a semi-permeable bed of clayey peat (aquitard) and an upper unconfined aquifer. Locally, the peat fades away and the granulometry of this horizon becomes silty sandy. A planned enlargement of the quarry will increase the size and depth of the quarry lakes. So the aquitard bed between the two aquifers will be damaged, creating a mixing rate of groundwater. Such a procedure would not be compatible with the presence of two municipal wells upstream from the quarries. Consequently, the installation of a vertical diaphragm (slurry wall) is recommended to separate the aquifers and to act as a filter for the groundwater flowing from the unconfined to the semi-confined aquifer. To predict the consequences caused by the installation of the vertical diaphragm separating the unconfined aquifer and the semi-confined one, a specifically adjusted finite-difference model was used. The model showed a maximum rising of the water table equal to 12 cm, just upstream of the diaphragm and for a distance of about 100 m, and a maximum lowering of 2 cm just downstream of the diaphragm. However, the slurry wall would not cause any change in the piezometric head in the area where there are municipal wells and, hence, will not have any negative effect on the functionality of the municipal wells. Moreover, the migration of water from the unconfined aquifer through the vertical diaphragm will stimulate a series of attenuation and auto-depuration processes of eventual contaminants. These processes are due to the higher crossing time that the groundwater flow takes to go through the vertical barrier (t _a = 96.5 days, whereas for the horizontal semi-permeable layer t _a = 9.6 days). So, the vertical diaphragm can be a resolutive element, representing a mediation and separation factor between the unconfined and the semi-confined aquifers along the border of the quarrying areas, and a protective barrier for the water quality of the quarry lake and the semi-confined aquifer.     

Digital Image Based Approach for Three-Dimensional Mechanical Analysis of Heterogeneous Rocks

Summary This paper presents a digital image based approach for three-dimensional (3-D) numerical simulation and failure analysis of rocks by taking into account the actual 3-D heterogeneity. Digital image techniques are adopted to extract two-dimensional (2-D) material heterogeneity from material surface images. The 2-D image mesostructures are further extrapolated to 3-D cuboid mesostructures by assuming the material surface as a representation of the inner material heterogeneity within a very small depth. The iterative milling and scanning system is set up to generate the 3-D rock mesostructures. A Hong Kong granite specimen is used as an example to demonstrate the procedure of 3-D mesostructure establishment. The mechanical responses and failure process under the conventional Brazilian tensile test condition are examined through numerical analyses. The stress distribution, crack propagation process and failure model of heterogeneous material cases are simulated with a finite difference software. The numerical results indicate that material heterogeneity plays an important role in determining the failure behavior of rocks under external loading.     

安徽省旅游星级饭店地域差异研究

根据2000～2005年安徽省星级饭店统计资料,利用变异系数这一度量标准分析了安徽省饭店在时间序列上和星级结构上的地域差异,结果表明:随着时间的变化饭店总数在各市间的差异在渐渐缩小.星级结构上五星级饭店地域分异程度最大,其次依次为一星级、四星级、三星级和二星级,通过安徽省各市国内旅游收入区位商和餐饮住宿业就业人员区位商与各市星级饭店数量相对水平的比较,找出不符合一般趋势的城市加以讨论.最后,运用SPSS分析软件对安徽省17个地市的星级饭店发展水平进行聚类分析,并讨论了运行结果所分出的4类城市,提出了饭店业发展的若干建议.     

The numerical solution of the Advection-Dispersion Equation: A review of some basic principles

The simulation of solute transport in rivers is frequently based on numerical models of the Advection-Dispersion Equation. The construction of reliable computational schemes, however, is not necessarily easy. The paper reviews some of the most important issues in this regard, taking the finite volume method as the basis of the simulation, and compares the performance of several types of scheme for a simple case of the transport of a patch of solute along a uniform river. The results illustrate some typical (and well known) deficiencies of explicit schemes and compare the contrasting performance of implicit and semi-Lagrangian versions of the same schemes. It is concluded that the latter have several benefits over the other types of scheme.     

Simulated effect of a forest road on near‐surface hydrologic response: redux

In the work reported here the comprehensive physics‐based Integrated Hydrology Model (InHM) was employed to conduct both three‐ and two‐dimensional (3D and 2D) hydrologic‐response simulations for the small upland catchment known as C3 (located within the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon). Results from the 3D simulations for the steep unchannelled C3 (i) identify subsurface stormflow as the dominant hydrologic‐response mechanism and (ii) show the effect of the down‐gradient forest road on both the surface and subsurface flow systems. Comparison of the 3D results with the 2D results clearly illustrates the importance of convergent subsurface flow (e.g. greater pore‐water pressures in the hollow of the catchment for the 3D scenario). A simple infinite‐slope model, driven by subsurface pore‐water pressures generated from the 3D and 2D hydrologic‐response simulations, was employed to estimate slope stability along the long‐profile of the C3 hollow axis. As expected, the likelihood of slope failure is underestimated for the lower pore pressures from the 2D hydrologic‐response simulation compared, in a relative sense, to the higher pore pressures from the 3D hydrologic response simulation. The effort reported herein provides a firm quantitative foundation for generalizing the effects that forest roads can have on near‐surface hydrologic response and slope stability at the catchment scale. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shape Similarity measures of Linear Entities

The essential of feature matching technology lies in how to measure the similarity of spatial entities.Among all the possible similarity measures,the shape similarity measure is one of the most important measures because it is easy to collect the necessary parameters and it is also well matched with the human intuition.In this paper a new shape similarity measure of linear entities based on the differences of direction change along each line is presented and its effectiveness is illustrated.     

弹道扰动引力的有限元逼近算法

为了克服多项式逼近弹道扰动引力的缺点，根据有限元插值的原理，采用了对弹道周围空间区域进行有限元剖分的方法，利用剖分单元各顶点的扰动引力分量内插出弹道点对应的扰动引力分量值。结果表明，文中提出的逼近算法能够快速精确可靠地逼近弹道扰动引力，是一种具有应用价值的方法。     

混流式转轮中流场的大涡模拟

建立了基于微可压缩流体理论的相对运动的大涡模拟方法,并对混流式转轮流场进行了三维非恒定粘性数值模拟,计算方法采用了有限体积法和预测-校正方法,对固体边壁的处理使用了“壁函数”法。得到了混流式转轮的三维速度场和压力分布,与k-ε模型计算结果进行比较表明,所建立的相对运动的大涡模拟方法对转轮性能预测更加精确、合理,对转轮改型设计具有十分重要的参考价值。     

堆载地基与邻近桩基的相互作用分析

本文在分析堆载条件下邻近桩基与土体的相互作用时，提出了改进弹性地基梁模型，采和最小势能原理推导了改进弹性地基梁的有限杆系法平衡方程，并编制了相应的分析程序EFBMPP，对影响桩基变位和弯矩的影响因素进行了计算分析。