Assessing suffusion susceptibility of soils from dam, dike based on geometric criteria

Abstract

       Internal erosion is one of the main causes of instabilities within hydraulic earth structures such as: dam, dike using soils. Internal erosion process was distinguished into four types: concentrated leak erosion, backward erosion, contact erosion and suffusion. This paper deals with suffusion, this erosion process can cause the change of grain size, porosity and hydraulic conductivity in dam, dike. Assessing of stability of dam, dike caused by suffusion process, was very complex and had not researched yet perfectly. The choice of property methods, criteria which assesses the stability for hydraulic earth structure, was very important. Geometric criteria were one of the important criteria to assess the safety of earth dam, dike and apply for all soils. This assessing based on grain size distribution of soils from dams, dikes. One MATLAB program to assess suffusion susceptibility of soils was given. The assessing results of suffusion susceptibility of dam, dike soils from Canada, France, Vietnam and cohesionless soils were given.