Efficiency assessment of vertical barriers on the basis of flow and transport numerical modeling

The construction of cut-off walls is a common solution applied in such disciplines as land reclamation and landfill containment. Most commonly the construction of vertical barriers is based on cut-off wall mono or diphase technology with the use of bentonite-cement mixture as a filling material. The content of the paper is focused on groundwater flow and transport numerical modeling conducted on landfill areas where vertical bentonite barriers were constructed. The modeling process was conducted with the use of FEMWATER software which employs analysis based on finite element method. There are two examples of the software application presented in the paper which concern such case studies, i.e., reclamation of Radiowo and Łubna landfill sites. These examples are provided to prove that the appropriate investigation of ground conditions as well as definition of initial and boundary conditions and correct selection of material parameters to be fed into the software, are crucial for the overall modeling process. Moreover, the comparison of results obtained from the numerical modeling and the groundwater monitoring on site is presented for one of the case studies.