Correspondingly, the mathematical expressions of the model canbe specified as follows :

Governing equation

Rumus

Initial Condition

Rumus

Boundary conditions

Rumus

With the growing importance of environmental issues in our society, clay liners of buffers and rock
have been increasingly used to create a barrier of very low permeability for retarding the
underground transport of hazardous wastes, including radioactive nuclear wastes (Chung and Yokel
1982:Wetsik et al 1982). To properly evaluate the ability of these natural geotechincal materials to
transmit fluids, it is fundamentally necessary to measure their permeability and specific storage.

For measuring extremely low permeabilities, conventional permeability test methods,such

as constant-head and falling-head methods have the limitations of requiring long testing times
tomethods, have the limitations of requiring long testing times to establish steady flow or toobtain
relatively reliable data.Kenney et al (1992) and Moir and Lionel (1992), in their studies on
permeability of compacted bentonite-sand mixutures, required about 30 to 50 days for measuring
permeabilities in the range of 10-10 to 10-11 m/s with hydraulic gradients from 15-40. Furthermore,
permeability reduction associated with long testing times can arise from bacterial growth and from
fabric changes brought about by chenges in pore solution chemistry during permeation (Hardcastle
and Michell 1974).

Brace et.al(1968) introduced a transient flow method to measure the permeability of tight
rocks like westerly Granite. Hsieh et al (1981) developed an excact analytical solution for this
method. The solution consider the permeability and the specific storange of the specimen nd also
the storage capacity of the equipment. However, this method requires a relatively high confining
pressure to resist the high fluid pressure that is suddenly increased in the upstream reservoir.

To measure the permeability of geotechnical materials backfilled at the shallow subsurface,

lower confining pressures existing in situ. In these cases, the flow pump permeability test method
introduced by Olsen et al (1985,1988) is very useful. Of course, this kind of permeability test can also
be used even when higher a constant-rate flow pump is used to precisely controlpore fluid transport
process in a specimen. The initial transient hydraulic head is recorded versus time and eventually
stabilizes to a steady state with a constant head gradient imposed across the specimen. A
corresponding value of permeability is gnerally determined from this steady state value using
Darcys law. However, it may hours and even tens of hours, as reported by Olsen et al (1991) and
Zhang et al (1995), respectively, to reach steady state when the storage capacity of the specimen
and/or the flow pump system is large. Theoritical analysis of the transient pressure response from a
constant flow-rate permeability test has been developed by Morin and Olsen (1987) for determining
the permeability during aearly testing time. The governing equation used for the analysis is
equivalent to that used by Terzaghi (1943) for describing onedimensional consolidation of saturated
soils. However, their approach does not conider the storage capacity of the flow pump equipment
and is therefore reasonbly accurate only when the storage capacity of flow pump system the
equpment compliance, is negligible compared with that of specimen.

In this paper, wepresent a general analytical solution of the flow pmp permeability test in
which both the storage capacities of the specimen and the flow pump equipment are accounted for.
Application of this theoritical solution to determine simultaneously the permeability and specific
storage of the sample and the storage capacity of flow pump system is also sdescribed.

Mathematic Model

The schemartic diagram and the boundary conditions associated with a flow pump
permeability test arrangement are depicted in Fig. I. A mathematical model can be derived by
improving the model established by Morin and (Olsen (1987)and Considering the storage capacity of
the flow pump system in the boundary conditions. Correspondingly, the mathematical expressins of
the model can be specified as follows :