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Field investigation and numerical modelling of gas extraction in a heterogeneous landfill with high leachate level

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Abstract

A field gas extraction experiment is carried out at a high-kitchen food large-scale landfill site with high leachate level. The leachate level was decreased to improve the pumping efficiency. Considering the heterogeneity of the municipal solid waste (MSW), the pores in the unsaturated MSW are divided into matrix pores and fractures. A transient dual-porosity model was then developed to analyze the pumping test results. The first and second boundary conditions considering the effect of cover layers of landfills was involved. The results show that the gas flow rate can be increased by 14–37% due to the drawdown of the leachate level. Compared with the single pore model, the dual-porosity model can better predict the field results, indicating that the preferential flow in the landfill caused by the heterogeneity of MSWs is very important. As the pumping pressure increases by a factor of 5, the ratio of fractures to pores wf can be decreased by a factor of 4.4. This may be due to the fact that the fractures will be compressed when the effective stress was increased as the negative pumping pressure was applied. The pumping pressure and the anisotropy value of the MSWs have the greater influence on the well radius of influence. The proposed model can be used for effective design of the field gas pumping experiments. The obtained gas generation rate, gas permeability of the dual porosity MSWs can be useful for gas transport analysis and gas pumping well design for the high-kitchen food content landfills.

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Data availability

Data are available from the authors upon reasonable request.

Abbreviations

β i :

The mass exchange coefficient of the i-th layer.

K mi :

The air permeability of the fracture and matrix exchange of the i-th layer.

K fri :

The horizontal air permeability of the fracture flow of the i-th layer.

K fzi :

The vertical air permeability of the fractures flow of the i-th layer.

K mri :

The horizontal air permeability of the matrix pores flow of the i-th layer.

K mzi :

The vertical air permeability of the matrix pores flow of the i-th layer.

K ri :

The horizontal air permeability of the MSW of the i-th layer.

K zi :

The vertical air permeability of the MSW of the i-th layer.

T :

Temperature.

R :

The gas constant.

μ :

The viscosity coefficient.

ω :

The molar mass of the gas.

a i :

The gas production rate of the i-th layer.

n gi :

The pore gas content of the i-th layer of landfill.

p fi :

The absolute pressure of the fractures flow in the i-th layer.

p mi :

The absolute pressure of the matrix pores flow in the i-th layer.

p i :

The absolute pressure of the i-th layer.

w f :

The volume of fractures divided by the total pores.

a n :

The anisotropy value.

ρ l :

The density of the landfill.

ρ g :

The density of landfill gas.

Q t :

Gas production rate of garbage in the i-th year.

M 1 :

The mass of the landfilled waste.

L 0 :

The potential LFG generation capacity.

k :

The average gas production rate constant of the landfill waste.

DOC i :

The content of degradable organic carbon of the i component.

W i :

The wet weight content of the i component.

d i :

The moisture content of the i component.

p 1 :

The pumping pressure.

p 0 :

The atmospheric pressure

Lc :

The cover layer coefficient.

k l :

The vertical air permeability of the cover layer.

d l :

The thickness of the cover layer.

D :

The diameter of the well.

H :

The thickness of the unsaturation waste.

H 0 :

The thickness of the initial unsaturated landfill

s :

The drawdown

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Acknowledgements

We appreciate the efforts of all the researchers whose articles were included in this study.

Funding

The financial support from the “Pioneer” and “Leading Goose” R&D Program of Zhejiang (Grant No. 2022C03051), National Key R & D Program of China (Grant Nos. 2018YFC1802303 and 2019YFC1806005), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51988101, 41977223 and 41931289), and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang province (Grant Nos. LR20E080002) are gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MOE Key Laboratory of Soft Soils and Geoenvironmental Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Haijian Xie, Shuangke Fei & Haijie He

  2. Center for Balance Architecture, Zhejiang University, 148 Tianmushan Road, Hangzhou, 310007, China

    Haijian Xie, Shuangke Fei & Yun Chen

  3. School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Taizhou University, Taizhou, 318000, China

    Haijie He

  4. Huangyan Social Undertakings Development Company of Taizhou, Taizhou, 318020, China

    An Zhang

  5. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong

    Junjun Ni

  6. Architectural Design and Research Institute of Zhejiang University Co. Ltd, 148 Tianmushan Road, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Yun Chen

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  1. Haijian Xie
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Contributions

Haijian Xie: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Writing—review & editing. Shuangke Fei: Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Visualization, Writing—original draft. Haijie He: Resources, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing. An Zhang: review & editing. Junjun Ni: review & editing. Yun Chen: review & editing.

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Correspondence to Haijian Xie.

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Xie, H., Fei, S., He, H. et al. Field investigation and numerical modelling of gas extraction in a heterogeneous landfill with high leachate level. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 76944–76960 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-21189-8

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