The Journal of Engineering Geology ISSN:1226-5268(Print) 2287-7169(Online) 지질공학

The media in the undersaturated zone is defined as the uppermost layer of the water table at which the groundwater is unsaturated or saturated discontinuously. The properties of the unsaturated zone can affect the reduction of contaminants that flow from the lower part of soil to the water table. In recent, there have been problems in evaluating groundwater contaminations vulnerability because weighted value for permeability is given, regardless of anisotropy and heterogeneity in the unsaturated media. Geological media have various ranges of permeability. When applying the weighted value, representative of permeability for grain sizes standardized, to construction of contamination vulnerability, it will produce more exaggerated result than the case that considers unsaturated geological properties. In this study, we performed laboratory column tests considering two sets of the unsaturated layers in order to investigate the permeability in anisotropic unsaturated zone with anisotropy. On the basis of the tests, average permeability coefficients were calculated considering the properties of unsaturated media obtained from drill cores in the field. The final contamination vulnerability map constructed shows that the contamination vulnerability map applying the properties of geological media of the unsaturated zone coincides much better with the results measured in the field, compared to the case of contamination vulnerability considering the weighted value in the unsaturated zone.