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A new screening model for leachate production assessment at landfill sites
Pantini, S.; Verginelli, I. & Lombardi, F.
Abstract
This paper presents an alternative water balance
model for predicting leachate production in landfills,
from the operative to the post-closure management. The
developed model, based on analytical and empirical
equations, provides a quantitative estimation of leachate
volumes, using a water balance approach which accounts
for the different rates of the incoming water, water losses
and water consumption. Aging and compression are also
included, allowing to assess the progressive variation of
hydraulic and physical properties of deposited wastes. In
this work, after a brief description of the model architecture,
different applications to hypothetical scenarios and to
a real landfill are presented. Namely, in order to highlight
how aging and biodegradation can influence the expected
leachate production, the results of the developed model are
also compared with those provided by the Hydrologic
Evaluation of Landfill Performance model which neglects
both these processes. The obtained results showed that
wastes compression may affect leachate prediction in a
large extent during operative stage of a landfill, and
neglecting these processes could lead to underestimation
up to one order of magnitude. Also biodegradation of waste
organic matter may result relevant for leachate volumes
assessment, influencing water storage capacity of wastes
and leading to a leachate production 2–3 times greater than
those obtained neglecting these phenomena. Finally, the
application of the developed model to the real landfill
shows a quite good agreement with the field data, whereas
the Hydrologic Evaluation of Landfill Performance model
tends to underestimate the leachate volumes with errors up
to 80 %.
Keywords
Biological-hydrological processes; Compression; Percolate; Water balance model; Wastes
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