Reliability Model for Soil Liners: Initial Design

Abstract
An initial design methodology is presented to estimate post‐construction reliability of soil liners, where reliability is defined as the probability that the post‐construction effective hydraulic conductivity K of a liner will be less than 1×107cm/s. In the initial design phase, liner hydraulic conductivity is estimated from: (1) A regression relationship between soil properties and K; (2) laboratory K‐measurements; and (3) compaction tests. A Bayesian methodology is used to combine the information from these three sources. The initial design reliability is shown to be influenced by the variability of the liner soil, laboratory measurement error, the error in the prediction relationship used, the number and nature of samples, and the dimensions of the liner. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the methodology.