Water Definition - Pressure & Positions
Ground water pressures, the most important parameter affecting the stability of structures and excavations, need to be defined
realistically for different problems. GALENA provides you with the tools to realistically define ground water and to define water and denser mediums above ground, a feature that GALENA pioneered for tailings dam
work.
GALENA enables water pressure to be defined as:
a simple phreatic surface
a piezometric pressure on one or all layers
an Ru pressure on one or all layers
a dense aboveground liquid medium such as tailings slurry or
any combination of these
GALENA allows definition of a phreatic surface that extends above the slope surface with a density specified for the resultant
aboveground medium - this is particularly useful for modeling water retaining structures such as dams, tailings dams or slurry pondages.
Phreatic surface definition is simple - just two points in many cases, and GALENA's CAD-like mouse-draw functions make for easy
definition of drawdown and non-planar surfaces.
Phreatic surface definition in GALENA also provides a simple way of modeling a fully or partially saturated slope where the density of
the medium-above-ground is simply defined as 0.0 (zero).
These and other features are simply part of the way GALENA makes it easier for you.
The image below shows a complex dam with a clay core. The bedrock layer (sandstone) contains a piezometric surface (shown in cyan and
labeled); and the dam water level (shown in blue and labeled) is modeled as a phreatic surface. The phreatic surface defines the water level behind the dam and within the dam structure and controls the pore-water
pressures within the weathered sandstone and clay layers.
It should be noted that with GALENA both the upstream face and downstream face of the dam can be analyzed using the one model simply by defining the failure surface appropriately - there is no need to 'flip' the model over to analyze the two faces.
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