FE 05.0207 / 2019 / LGB - Mode of action of geosynthetic drainage elements in multilayered unsaturated earth structuresl

The project is part of the cluster STRUK "Compatibility of Road Construction, Environmental Protection and Circular Economy" of the research line "Resource-efficient and environmentally friendly road construction". In the StrUK cluster it is important to create balanced assessment criteria for an environmentally efficient and at the same time economical use of secondary building materials and soil material. From the perspective of road construction, with regard to the conservation of resources and floors or building materials with environmentally relevant ingredients can be supplied to a high-quality use, if these z. B. be installed with a technical safety measure. This is intended to prevent environmentally relevant ingredients from entering the groundwater with the leachate. Recent findings show that the use of a drainage mat significantly reduces the perineal seepage. Since the interaction of the geometric and hydraulic boundary conditions, the dam material and the TS is very complex, in the future the effectiveness in the concrete application will be reliably assessed on the basis of simulation calculations.

Due to the complex structure of a geosynthetic drainage element, the hydraulic properties of drainage mats in the water-saturated state can not yet be sufficiently measured and mapped in simulation programs.

The aim of the research project is to reliably calculate numerically the water balance of embankments with different, geosynthetic drainage elements. The lack of unsaturated hydraulic characteristics of the nonwovens and drainage cores should first be determined in the laboratory by metrology, validated on a large scale and then confirmed by simulation calculations.