Predicting Self-Healing Capacity of GCLs with Circular or Slit Damages

A modified method for predicting self-healing capacity of GCL with circular or slit damages has been presented. The usefulness of the method has been checked by applying it to two sets of self-healing capacity test data reported in the literature, and fair to good agreements between the measured and predicted self-healing ratios (healed area divided by the total damage area) were obtained. Further, the self-healing capacity of a handmade GCL using a newly developed polymerized bentonite (PB) as core material (PB-GCL) was investigated experimentally. The test results show that the PB-GCL has higher self-healing capacity than that of GCL using natural bentonite, and with deionized water, a circular damage hole up to 100 mm in diameter and with 0.6 M NaCl solution (simulating sea water), a hole up to 15 mm in diameter were self-healed. Finally, the method for predicting self-healing capacity of GCL was applied to the PB-GCL, and the results indicate that a key model parameter, a reference mass of bentonite entered a damage hole has to be modified from 3 g (for natural bentonite) to 5.5 g (for PB).