Simulation of flow slides in municipal solid waste dumps using a modified MPS method

Abstract

Flow slides in municipal solid waste (MSW) dumps have caused serious damage to structures and casualties all over the world. Therefore, much attention should be paid to this type of disaster to elucidate the flow mechanisms and fluidization characteristics of MSW, which are essential for the assessment and prevention of flowlike hazards. To bypass the deficiencies of the traditional analysis methods that use the mesh method and are based on a framework of solid mechanics, the moving particle semi-implicit (MPS) method, which is a purely Lagrangian meshless method and proposed for incompressible flow, is introduced to study flow slides in MSW landfills. Considering the no-physical pressure fluctuation that affects the simulation accuracy in the original MPS, the original MPS is revised in three ways: the kernel function, the source term of the Poisson equation and the search for free surface particles. Two benchmark problems, the dam break problem and the static pressure problem, are computed to illustrate the improvement of the pressure stability of the modified MPS. The Bingham constitutive model combined with the Mohr–Coulomb failure criterion is adopted to depict the dynamic features of MSW flow slides, and the equivalent viscosity is employed to bridge the gap between Bingham fluid models and Newtonian fluid models. This method, ultimately, is applied to simulate real flow slides in the Umraniye–Hekimbashi landfill and the Payatas waste dump. The numerical results show good consistency with the field data, indicating that the modified MPS method is capable of capturing the essential dynamic behavior and reproducing the entire process of complicated flow slides in MSW dumps.