Modelling the interference of underground structures with groundwater flow and remedial solutions in Milan

A 3D Geodatabase for Urban Underground Infrastructures: Implementation and Application to Groundwater Management in Milan Metropolitan Area

“…The integration of the GDB with numerical groundwater flow models will make it possible to define future scenarios of interaction according to the trend of the piezometric levels. The infrastructural elements have both an active and passive effect on groundwater [41][42][43][78][79][80][81][82][83][84]. This contributes to characterizing urban modelling as a specific branch of hydrogeology, with its own time, scales, and dynamics of the hydrogeological processes [85].…”

“…A top-down design mechanism was adopted, following a first-come-first-served basis approach [12,52,53]. M1 and M2 lines were built at first, with a cut and cover method to avoid interrupting the traffic on the main roads [43]. Built during the groundwater drawdown phase, they were not designed with waterproofing systems [41].…”

“…M3 line and the underground railway were built in the 1990s: due to their greater depth, they were designed with waterproofing systems. Both these constraints and the diffusion of new excavation methods [21,43] have led to the building of the most recent lines (M5 line completed in 2015; M4 line, still in construction) at greater depths; these lines have been designed to reach the most peripheral areas of the city.…”

“…The city of Milan experienced a strong groundwater table rise in the last few decades [40]. As numerical groundwater flow modelling is the primary tool for evaluating the interactions between groundwater and underground infrastructures [34], different 3D models have been realized for the urban area of Milan [41][42][43]. Among the underground infrastructures listed above, all these numerical models focused only on the subway lines: interactions between groundwater and car parks were not evaluated.…”

Hydro-stratigraphic datasets for the reconstruction of a large scale 3D FEM numerical model in the Milan metropolitan area (northern Italy)

“… One of the objectives of groundwater numerical modeling is to accurately reproduce the flow velocity field and the flow and transport pathways. In this article the hydro-stratigraphic dataset, used in the co-submitted article “Modeling the interference of underground structures with groundwater flow and remedial solutions in Milan” (De Caro et al., 2020) [1] , is presented. The work aims to reconstruct the spatial variability of the hydraulic parameters in the shallow aquifers of the Milan City area (northern Italy) and to integrate them in a groundwater flow 3D finite element method (FEM) numerical model.…”