ANALYSIS OF STEADY FLOW THROUGH A HOMOGENEOUS EARTH DAM WITH HORIZONTAL TOE DRAIN

Abstract

Estimation of flow through earth dams have been subject of several investigation in the past, of particular interest is flow through homogeneous earth drain having horizontal toe drain. Till today, Kozeny model is widely used because of its simplicity to estimate the quantity of seepage. One of major limitations of Kozeny's model is that it does not account for flow resistance in a certain segment of the dam body. The analysis for unconfined steady flow is done by constructing a hodograph. Since, for the unconfined flow problem considered in the present investigation, the respective hodograph consists of circle and straight lines passing through origin, the inverse hodograph planes have straight line boundaries only. Hence, the Schwarz-Christoffel transformation is used for finding the solutions to the problems after inverses of the hodograph are found. The study indicates that the seepage estimates on the higher side when Kozeny model is used .