Analyzing Three-dimensional Consolidation Problems of Multi-aquifers due to Surface Loadings by Laplace-Fourier Transform Method

Abstract

This thesis applied the numerical procedure developed by Vardoulakis and Harnpattanapanich to solve three-dimensional consolidation problems caused by surface loading This procedure (we call it the L-F method) is based on Biot’s poroelastic theory of soils and the general solution of the displacement functions in the transform spatial and time domains Since the general solutions consist of exponential functions in terms of depth z and the transformed variable "s" of time difficulties will occur when the components of exponential terms excess the numerical limits This research focused on improving the L-F method to solve some extreme cases including (1) thick-layer problems (2) multi-aquifers/aquitards systems and (3) limiting time consolidation behaviors Additionally finite element models were built to verify the results of our numerical method and the verification was carried out in both plane-strain and 3D problems The comparisons show that our numerical techniques successfully solve the difficulties related to exponential terms and the efficiency of the L-F method is better than the finite element method especially for 3D problems

Date of Award	2018 Oct 9
Original language	English
Supervisor	Yu-Yun Lin (Supervisor)