Guangcheng Li

Long, narrow, deep excavations commonly encountered in practice, such as those for subway stations, require effective groundwater management to prevent disasters in water-rich areas. To achieve this, a cut-off curtain and pumping well are typically employed during long, deep foundation pit dewatering. The unsteady groundwater flow behavior in the confined aquifer must consider the influence of the cut-off curtain during dewatering. This paper establishes a two-dimensional analytical model to describe transient groundwater flow in a confined aquifer with a cut-off curtain. Both the dewatering well pumped at a steady discharge inside the pit and the cut-off curtain are partially penetrating in the anisotropic confined aquifer. With the help of the Laplace and Fourier cosine transformations, the semi-analytical drawdown solution for the model is derived and validated against numerical solution and unsteady pumping test data. It is shown that the inserted cut-off curtain depth and the structural parameters of the pumping well significantly affect the drawdown inside the pit. Sensitivity analysis reveals that, regardless of whether the observation is made inside or outside the curtain, the drawdown is very sensitive to the change in pumping rate, aquifer thickness, storage coefficient, and horizontal hydraulic conductivity. Additionally, drawdown near the cut-off curtain outside the pit is sensitive to the vertical hydraulic conductivity of the aquifer, the width of the pit, and the interception depth of the cut-off curtain, while drawdown far from the curtain outside the pit is not sensitive to the location and length of the well screen.