The ISSMGE Kerry Rowe Lecture: The role of diffusion in environmental geotechnics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Diffusion of contaminants can play a significant if not dominant role in many applications encountered within the field of environmental geotechnics. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the important role diffusion plays in such applications. The presentation proceeds from a historical perspective, beginning with the recognition in the late 1970s to early 1980s that diffusion may be an important process in assessing contaminant migration through low-permeability barriers in waste containment applications. Data from the literature and simplified model simulations are used to illustrate under what conditions diffusion is important, and the significance of diffusion is illustrated with respect to different barrier components and types of barriers used in waste containment applications. The barriers considered include natural clays, compacted clay liners, geomembranes, geosynthetic clay liners, composite liners, vertical cutoff walls, subaqueous caps for contaminated sediments, and highly compacted bentonite buffers for high-level radioactive waste containment. The significance of semi-permeable membrane behavior on liquid-phase diffusion through bentonite-based barriers also is highlighted. The potential importance of matrix diffusion as an attenuation mechanism for contaminant transport is illustrated, and the roles of both liquid-phase and gas-phase diffusion under unsaturated conditions are discussed. Finally, the role of diffusion in terms of remediation applications is illustrated via an example analysis illustrating the impact of reverse matrix or back diffusion on the effectiveness of pump-and-treat remediation, as well as via a summary of several diffusion-based models commonly used to describe the leaching of contaminants from a variety of stabilized–solidified waste forms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it