The knowledge about the infiltration behaviour of a dike body is an important issue in dike design and flood risk assessment. To reduce the risk of stability failures during flood events, the infiltration rate of a dike should be kept low and the elapsing time to reach the saturated steady state should be long. A number of full-scale physical flood simulation experiments on the Rostock research dike, on which different processed dredged materials were applied in the dike body (cover layers in particular) showed that the infiltration time and rate is much higher as can be expected from comprehensive laboratory test data. To obtain information about the unsaturated/saturated hydraulic soil properties of the installed dredged materials in situ, an automatic multi-objective model calibration method for a minimizing problem is used to reduce the residuals between simulated and observed time series (hydraulic head pressure, suction pressure and rate budget). The measured suction pressure time series of these physical experiments lets us suppose, that it is not possible to simulate the suction pressure behaviour of the installed dredged material using RICHARD’s unsaturated flow equation with a proper water retention function and unsaturated flow conductivity. It seems that the hysteresis effects are negligibly small and the hydraulic behaviour is governed by the inter-aggregate pore structure. In the paper, different back-calculation methods to fit the soil hydraulic parameters to the full-scale measurements are discussed and compared a proposal for the evaluation of the data is provided.

A variety of studies recently proved the applicability of different dried, fine-grained dredged materials as replacement material for erosion-resistant sea dike covers. In Rostock, Germany, a large-scale field experiment was conducted, in which different dredged materials were tested with regard to installation technology, stability, turf development, infiltration, and erosion resistance. The infiltration experiments to study the development of a seepage line in the dike body showed unexpected measurement results. Due to the high complexity of the problem, standard geo-hydraulic models proved to be unable to analyze these results. Therefore, different methods of inverse infiltration modeling were applied, such as the parameter estimation tool (PEST) and the AMALGAM algorithm. In the paper, the two approaches are compared and discussed. A sensitivity analysis proved the presumption of a non-linear model behavior for the infiltration problem and the Eigenvalue ratio indicates that the dike infiltration is an ill-posed problem. Although this complicates the inverse modeling (e.g., termination in local minima), parameter sets close to an optimum were found with both the PEST and the AMALGAM algorithms. Together with the field measurement data, this information supports the rating of the effective material properties of the applied dredged materials used as dike cover material.