A semi-analytical solution to organic contaminants transport through composite liners considering a single crack in...

Compacted clay liners (CCLs) are extensively used as engineering barriers for groundwater and soil pollution. The existence of cracks/fractures in CCL caused by thermally induced shrinkage is reported to importantly damage the performance of the CCL. An analytical model is developed to study the effects of the cracks/fractures on the migration of organic contaminants through a composite liner system. Laplace transformation and Laplace inversion using the Stehfest method are adopted to derive the analytical solution, which is validated by the experimental data. The existence of crack shows a significant impact on the breakthrough curve and bottom flux of organic contaminants. Increasing the crack width from 1 to 25 mm results in an enhancement of contaminant bottom concentration by a factor of 280. Increasing the adsorption factor and degradation rate of contaminants can effectively improve the performance of the composite liner with cracks. The effects of degradation of contaminants on the breakthrough curve are found to be more significant for the case with a larger retardation factor. This may be due to the fact that increasing the retardation factor can significantly slow down the transport of contaminants, which may indirectly create a longer period for the degradation of contaminants.