Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Civil/Mechanical/Manufacturing Engineering
Session: 4
Room: Exhibit Hall
Maalvika Aggarwal - Prairie View A&M University
Co-Author(s): Md Jobair Bin Alam, Prairie View A&M University, TX
It is significantly important to understand the moisture distribution patterns of landfill cover soil in response to the environment loading, such as precipitation, temperature, etc. The spatial moisture distribution characteristics of landfill cover soil due to precipitation can potentially provide the likelihood of percolation. A precipitation barrier may have been an effective system to retain the moisture equilibrium condition of landfill cover soil, where the moisture equilibrium refers to the soil’s negligible gaining or losing of moisture content due to environmental loadings. This study analyzes the moisture distribution characteristics of three distinct types of prototype landfill final cover systems: evapotranspiration (ET) cover, conventional clay cover, and engineered turf cover, under identical atmospheric conditions, hypothesizing that the engineered turf would retain a moisture equilibrium condition, thus, making the engineered turf cover system a sustainable final cover system.The study was conducted in a humid subtropical climatic region (South Texas). All the covers were constructed side-by-side and were instrumented identically with state-of-art sensors to measure the moisture content of the soils. A weather station was also installed at the site to measure the climatic parameters. The data were monitored for the last twelve months which included a variety of climatic conditions. We performed the time-series analysis and descriptive statistics to summarize the features of the soil-moisture data. Moreover, we used the Gaussian distribution to investigate the spread out of the moisture data. The results indicated that the moisture profile of the soil under the turf cover had almost a flat propagation, while the soil moisture in the other covers had significant fluctuation under climatic effects. It was also observed that moisture data only in the soil under the turf was normally distributed. The normal distribution plot of the turf cover showed that almost 95% of the data were clustered around 0.207 to 0.215 m3/m3. On the contrary, the other two covers’ soil had a similar wider spread out of moisture data ranging approximately from 0.06 to 0.34 m3/m3. Hence, the findings from this study showed the engineered turf’s ability to maintain a moisture equilibrium condition under the humid subtropical climate than other landfill covers. The future research question demands the investigation of the distribution of soil suction or the negative pore water pressure of soil beneath an engineered turf under the influence of climatic loadings. It is also critically important to explore the feasibility of decreasing the soil depth below the engineered turf for cost efficiency as it retains the moisture equilibrium condition.References: Khire, M.V. (2016). Geoclimatic Design of Water Balance Covers for Municipal Solid Waste Landfills in Texas.Hauser, V.L. (2009). Evapotranspiration Covers for Landfills and Waste Sites. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding provided for this research by the National Science Foundation (NSF), grant number #2101081. The authors also acknowledge Watershed Geosynthetics LLC. for providing materials and technical support to install the engineered turf onsite.
Faculty Advisor: Md Jobair Bin Alam, mdalam@pvamu.edu
Role: I was involved from the very beginning of the project. I was involved in construction activities, instrumentation, data collection, and data analysis. Especially, I am greatly involved in the data collection and analyzing the data using statistical analysis, time series analysis. I will continue to work in this project until I graduate. I will be continuing the data collection and analysis.