Permeability and Retention to Water and Leachate of a Compacted Soil Used as Liner

Abstract

In many developing countries, a landfill remains one of the most extensively employed solid waste disposal solutions. Although a landfill is a well-designed engineering system, the base lining of a landfill may perform poorly and allow the leachate to reach the underlying soil layers and groundwater. Leachates contain a variety of toxic and hazardous contaminants, which are attenuated in the soil by various processes that slow or transform them. Thus, the objective of this research was to study the water and leachate permeability and retention of the liner soil in a landfill experimental cell by subjecting it to geotechnical, chemical-mineralogical, and physicochemical characterizations, water and leachate permeability tests, and mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP). In addition, the water and leachate retention curves were determined and analyzed using RETention Curve (RETC) software to obtain the unsaturated permeability curves. The leachate in the soil decreased the suction considering the moisture content of the compacted soil in the field, which consequently increased the leachate permeability of the mineral liner. For the same suction value, in the drying pathways, the soil retained a greater amount of distilled water than leachate. In the wetting pathways, the opposite occurred. Microorganisms were detected in the soil during the filter paper test. The permeability coefficients of the unsaturated soil were directly proportional to the gravimetric moisture content for the water and the leachate, which demonstrated that the soil presents lower unsaturated permeability coefficients for water than for leachate for the same water content.