ABSTRACT
Bentonite is a micro-inhomogeneous material consisting essentially of nanometer scale of clay minerals, mainly montmorillonite. We propose a new numerical simulation procedure, which is a coupling method of the molecular dynamics (MD) and the homogenization analysis (HA). The procedure is called the unified MD/HA method (Kawamura et al. 1997: Ichikawa et al. 1998). Here MD is used for defining micro-scale material properties based on the molecular behavior, and HA is introduced to extrapolate the microscopically inhomogeneous continuum characteristics to the bulk-scale continuum behavior. Permeability of bentonite calculated by this unified MD/HA method is well-conformable to the experimental data given by Pusch (1994). In this paper we apply the permeability results to a consolidation problem, and calculate stability of a clay wall designed for waste disposal facility.
