A low solids concentration suspension material is transited to a soil layer through two stages which occur simultaneously, sedimentation and consolidation. While sedimentation occurs in the uppermost part of material-soil particles settle under their own weight, in the remaining accumulated sediment part the soil particles form a continuous structure, so called the 'Terzaghi soil' that is a soil governed by Terzaghi's effective stress principle. Because of the formation of this structure, a discrete boundary, separating the sediment from suspension more like a fluid, is formed. This boundary is called a 'shock boundary' on which kinematic shocks occur.
Both sedimentation and consolidation are of interest in different scientific fields, especially in chemical and geotechnical engineering. But a number of difficulties have obstructed the development of a numerical method that is able to analyze these two separate and simultaneous processes together. In this thesis the sedimentation was considered as the solid flux on the standpoint of the Eulerian coordinate system and consolidation as the fluid flux on the standpoint of Lagrangian coordinate system. From this basic understanding, a program for one-dimensional analysis of sedimentation-consolidation was developed using finite element method.
In this program the governing equations-continuity equation only for sedimentation, continuity and force equilibrium equations for consolidation- are separately applied, but the interactions of two processes were considered continuously by keeping track of the shock boundary. The comparison of the results obtained from the program and those of four adopted papers verified the performance. In addition, to evaluate the effectiveness of electrokinetic dewatering, the influence of electro-osmotic permeability was studied and applied.
