ABSTRACT
Desiccation-induced cracking and associated potential damage of geosynthetic clay liners has been the subject of numerous recent studies. In a previous study by the authors, crack propagation in GCLs was systematically investigated using an X-ray scanner. Based on this, the constitutive relationship between water content and crack intensity factor (CIF) for GCLs under combined impact of drying and wetting with divalent salt solutions has been derived. In the current contribution, the X-ray images of the aforementioned study are examined with respect to their crack width distribution. For this purpose, the experimental results were idealised as a Gaussian distribution and the median and variance were analysed. It was shown that there is a unique relation between median and variance independent of the hydration fluid.
