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A Drainage Model for a Reclaimed Surface Mine¹

ABSTRACT

Stripmine reclamation for row-crop production employing bench-terraced geometry is under study and may become increasingly common. A simplified model of the postreclamation soil profile at the Iowa Coal Project Demonstration Mine No. I is created. The model is used to find the steady-state water-table shape if one tube drain per terrace is installed. Dupuit-Forchheimer (D. F.) theory is used for the analyses. Water-table curves are generated for a series of alternative drain-tube locations. An analysis is made to find the best position for the drain tube. It is found that, for a recharge-to-soil-conductivity ratio of 0.01 for terraces repeating at a 45.7-m (150-ft) interval, the best drain-tube location is beneath the horizontal portion of the terrace 4.87 m (16 ft) from the toe of the backslope if the drain tubes are placed 2.44 m (8 ft) beneath the surface of soil underlaid by a barrier at 3.05 m (10 ft) depth. The horizontal portion of the bench terraces is 38.08 m (125 ft), and the vertical drop from one terrace to the next is 3.05 m (10 ft). A table of best drain locations is given for other drain depths and recharge rates. Previous work on D.F. theory for a uniformly sloped barrier is discussed briefly and compared with and contrasted to the present work for a barrier that parallels the bench-terraced surface of the reclaimed surface mine.

¹ Journal Paper No. J-9126 of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station, Ames, Iowa. Project No. 2166. Research supported by Cooperative State Research Service Special Grant No. 684-15-2 under the Mineland Reclamation Research Program.

² Research Assistant, and Professor of Agronomy and Physics, Iowa State Univ., Ames, IA 50011, respectively. The senior author is now Assistant Professor, Department of Soils, North Dakota State Univ., Fargo, ND 58102. The authors thank Mr. S. B. Affleck for use of infiltration data.

Received for publication April 12, 1978. Accepted for publication September 21, 1978.