Contribution 12
Submitted by: Marina Pantazidou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Quantifying protection offered by landfill liners using different measures and respective detailed calculations
Sample Description
(1) Course Name/Type: Environmental Geotechnics/Elective course at the 5th year of an integrated masters civil engineering curriculum
(2) Course Emphasis: polluted land, contaminant transport, remediation
(3) Descriptive Title of Sample: Quantifying protection offered by landfill liners using different measures and respective detailed calculations
(4) Brief Teaching Note:
This extended assignment evaluates the “protection” offered by landfill liners when compared with the reference clay liner specified by the European Union Directive 1999/31/EC. To perform calculations, “protection” is quantified by three alternate measures: (1) specific discharge of leachate passing through the liner, (2) contaminant travel time (advection only) and (3) time for breakthrough of concentration C = 0.01Co, where Co is contaminant concentration in the leachate.
Measures (1) and (2) are calculated by solving the leachate flow problem and measure (3) is calculated by solving the advection-dispersion transport problem, first with an approximate “by hand” solution and then with the exact solution with the help of an educational software by Valocchi et al. (2014). Calculation results show that the three measures correspond to different equivalency factors. The most conservative approach is to solve the transport problem (measure 3).
5) References: Valocchi, A.J., Werth, C.J., Decker, J.J., Hammond, G., Zhou, P. and Hafiz, M. (2014). Interactive Models for Groundwater Flow and Solute Transport, Computer Applications in Engineering Education, https://doi.org/10.1002/cae.20000
Educational applets created by Valocchi and coworkers: http://hydrolab.illinois.edu/gw_applets/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.