Abstract
During the operation of landfills, leachate recirculation and aeration are widely applied to accelerate the waste stabilization process. However, these strategies may induce high pore pressures in waste, thereby affecting the stability of the landfill slope. Therefore, a three-dimensional numerical analysis for landfill slope stability during leachate recirculation and aeration is performed in this study using strength reduction method. The bio-hydro coupled processes of waste are simulated by a previously reported landfill coupled model programmed on the open-source platform OpenFOAM and then incorporated into the slope stability analysis. The results show that both increasing the injection pressure for leachate recirculation and maximum anaerobic biodegradation rate will reduce the factor of safety (FS) of the landfill slope maximally by 0.32 and 0.62, respectively, due to increased pore pressures. The ignorance of both waste biodegradation and gas flow will overestimate the slope stability of an anaerobic bioreactor landfill by about 20–50%, especially when the landfilled waste is easily degradable. The FS value of an aerobic bioreactor landfill slope will show a significant reduction (maximally by 53% in this study) when the aeration pressure exceeds a critical value and this value is termed as the safe aeration pressure. This study then proposes a relationship between the safe aeration pressure and the location of the air injection screen (i.e., the horizontal distance between the top of the injection screen and the slope surface) to avoid landfill slope failure during aeration. The findings of this study can provide insights for engineers to have a better understanding of the slope stability of a bioreactor landfill and to design and control the leachate recirculation and aeration systems in landfills.
Highlights
Sanitary landfills still play a significant role in the disposal of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in most countries
The following assumptions were adopted in the numerical modelling: (1) landfill gas and leachate were immiscible, and their migrations can be described by Darcy’s law; (2) leachate was incompressible, and landfill gas was assumed as ideal gas; (3) the intermediate products of waste biodegradation processes were neglected; (4) and the small-strain assumption was applied to calculate waste deformation
A smaller landfill height is adopted because the influence radius of aeration wells is generally less than 10 m (Fytanidis and Voudrias 2014), and the effect of aeration on the slope stability can be presented more clearly
Summary
Sanitary landfills still play a significant role in the disposal of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in most countries. The distribution of pore pressures and the change in landfill slope stability during leachate recirculation have been studied by many researchers. The waste biodegradation and landfill gas flow that would significantly affect the redistribution of pore pressures and the reduction of waste effective stress during recirculation (Lu et al 2019) were generally neglected in most numerical analyses for landfill slope stability (Byun et al 2019; Feng et al 2018; Koerner and Soong 2000; Xu et al 2012). Many environmental disasters induced by landfills are closely related to the biodegradation of MSW, and the generation and migration of gas and leachate in landfills (Lu et al 2020). The stability analysis of a bioreactor landfill slope should consider waste biodegradation and the corresponding multi-phase flow
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