OasisLMS

Dams are a well-known product to deal with several purposes of water handling. Dams for instance are built to provide water for the water supply of humans, for irrigation support in farming, for the use in industrial processes like generating hydroelectric power or for flood protection.

The oldest dams were built already about 5.000 years ago. Of course, there is a development in the past regarding design and construction of earth fill embankment dams and obviously there is a big focus in seepage control and leakage prevention. But unfortunately, for various reasons, this has not always been successful.

Therefore, there is a need to seal existing dam structures where leakages already occurred, or to upgrade existing structures in order to prevent potential leakages for the future.

A very common approach is the installation of a cut off wall to fulfil these tasks. There are many kinds of methodologies to install cut off walls (COW), e.g., sheet piles, diaphragm walls, soil mixing, to name only some of them.

Therefore, the paper will describe the construction methods and the sequence of activities required for the construction of cut-off-walls with focus on using a trench cutter system as well as the Cutter Soil Mixing (CSM) technology. It will also describe the main equipment which will be needed to execute these works and will show references for the use of these methodologies.

Franz-Werner Gerressen, BAUER Maschinen GmbH

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