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Leachate drainage volume of municipal solid waste landfills: field testing and hydro-mechanical modeling

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Abstract

The leachate drainage volume (LDV) of municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills is crucial to the operation of leachate treatment plant and development at the leachate level, but there is still a lack of reasonable evaluation methods. In this study, the evaluation methods, including both field measurements and numerical simulations, are proposed and applied in the case study of a MSW landfill in Southeastern China. For field measurements, 23 boreholes were drilled to test the leachate level distribution, and thus to determine the saturated volume (SV) of the landfill. The water retention capacity of the drilled samples was tested in a compression cell for a calculation of the undrainage volume (UV) of the landfill, and total LDV was obtained as SV-UV. The total LDV and SV were measured to be 2.31 × 105 m3 and 1.08 × 106 m3, respectively, which indicated a total leachate drainage percentage (LDV/SV) of 22%. For numerical simulations, a hydro-mechanical model is established to predict the daily LDV during layered landfilling. The model couples leachate flow and MSW compression, which are two fundamental processes determining daily LDV. As the model takes into account the leachate generation caused by the compression of MSW, the prediction has a good agreement with the measurement. If ignoring compression, the daily LDV will be underestimated by a percentage of 35%–50%. This study provides basic information and an assessment framework of leachate drainage volume and contributes to leachate management in landfills.

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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

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Funding

The work is funded by the Exploration Project of the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant nos. LQ21E080003, LCZ19E080001, and LTZ22D010001), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 52108348 and 51978435), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant no. 2021M692836), the Science and Technology Project of the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development (Grant nos. 2020-K-026 and 2021-K-125), and the Science and Technology Project of Department of Housing and Urban–Rural Development of Zhejiang Province (Grant no. 2020K164).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Taizhou University, Jiaojiang, 318000, China

    Hai Jie He

  2. Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Hai Jie He & Jie Hu

  3. Fangyuan Construction Group Co., Ltd, Taizhou, 318000, China

    Hai Jie He

Authors
  1. Hai Jie He
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  2. Jie Hu
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Contributions

HJH performed the field test and wrote the original manuscript. JH established the mathematical model and revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jie Hu.

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He, H.J., Hu, J. Leachate drainage volume of municipal solid waste landfills: field testing and hydro-mechanical modeling. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 64680–64691 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20413-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20413-9

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