Critical interfaces and waste placement in landfill design

Abstract

The purposes of this paper are to use the previous authors’ study to investigate the effect of geometrical dimensions on the changes of the failure interfaces and to develop a design procedure for waste placement operations. Four scenarios were selected to conduct analysis so as to find various failure interface changes of the waste depth and also changes of the front and back slopes. The critical liner interface with the minimum factor of safety can vary from one to another with such changes. The curves of FS = 1·0 developed for each case can also be used to evaluate whether the waste mass filled in these landfill cells will possibly fail at a certain waste depth. In addition, a waste-filling sequence was generated so as to maintain FS above a stipulated value during filling operations. It is important to ensure that the minimum FS at the critical interface is always equal to or greater than a targeted value during waste filling, which, in turn, corresponds to different geometric dimensions of the waste.