Study on the Spatially Variable Saturated Hydraulic Conductivity and Deformation Behavior of Accumulation Reservoir Landslide Based on Surface Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Survey

Abstract

Saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) is spatially variable in accumulation landslide sites that exert significant effort onto landslide seepage and deformation behavior. To better understand spatial variability and the effect of Ks on the slide mass of an accumulation landslide, this study introduced the surface nuclear magnetic resonance (SNMR) technology to study a representative reservoir accumulation landslide field in the Three Gorges Reservoir area (TGRA), the Baishuihe landslide, to obtain a series of relative reliable spatial measurements of Ks effectively on the basis of calibration in terms of the field tests measurements. The estimated Ks values were distributed log-normally for the overall landslide mass site with a wide range of 3.00 × 10−6∼7.80 × 10−3 cm/s, which reaches about 3 orders of magnitude. Variogram analysis indicated that the Ks values have the range (A) of 295.89 m and 65.56 m for the overall site and major cross-sectional analysis, respectively. A finite-element seepage-stress analysis associated with a Kriging-interpolated spatial Ks variable calculation model based on the best-fitted theoretical variogram was subsequently performed to study the seepage and deformation behavior of the landslide. The available monitored data and simulated results of the finite-element seepage-stress analysis indicated that the Baishuihe landslide is a progressive landslide, and the main factor influencing the deformation is rainfall and reservoir water fluctuation. This study provides an unconventional framework for studying the heterogeneous geomaterial and contributes to a better understanding of the spatial variation of the hydraulic property of accumulation reservoir landslides at a field scale.

SoilKsatDB: global database of soil saturated hydraulic conductivity measurements for geoscience applications

“…The soil saturated hydraulic conductivity (K sat ) describes the rate of water movement through saturated soils and is defined as the ratio between water flux and hydraulic gradient (Amoozegar and Warrick, 1986). It is a key variable in a number of hydrological, geomorphological, and climatological applications, such as rainfall partitioning into infiltration and runoff (Vereecken et al, 2010), optimal irrigation design (Hu et al, 2015), and the prediction of natural hazards including catastrophic floods and landslides (Batjes, 1996;Gliński et al, 2000;Zhang et al, 2018). Accurate measurements of K sat in the laboratory and field are laborious and time consuming and are often scale dependent (Youngs, 1991).…”