干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

The northwestern region of China is mainly semi-arid to arid and loess is ubiquitous. This natural resource has considerable potential to be transformed into earthen final covers for local landfills, but first its suitability must be ascertained through extensive tests. In this study, a device was developed to measure the gas permeability of unsaturated compacted loess specimens. Experiments were carried out to investigate the influence of clod size, compaction water content, and post-compaction water content on the gas permeability of the compacted loess. To maintain an identical soil structure, the post-compaction water content was changed using the osmotic technique. It was found that the compaction water content and resultant soil clod size exerted a combined effect on the gas permeability such that, at low water contents, the gas permeability remained fairly constant, but at high water contents the clods became relatively large, and the effect of the clod size dominated the water blockage effect from increasing water content. For specimens with identical soil structure, the gas permeability decreased with the increasing post-compaction degree of saturation at an accelerated rate. A power function is proposed to predict the relationship between the gas permeability normalized by the porosity function of the Kozeny-Carmen model and the post-compaction degree of saturation. Analysis of the experimental data indicates that the parameters for the power function still depend on the porosity of the compacted loess, particularly at high degrees of saturation.