Numerical modelling to show variation in the amount of leachate in a solid waste column in the sanitary landfill sites of the Mejía and Ambato cantons
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Data Science, Environmental Impacts
- Keywords
- Infiltration, hydraulic load, leachate, simulation, percentage of leachate., pressure load
- Copyright
- © 2018 Cuásquer Jordán et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Numerical modelling to show variation in the amount of leachate in a solid waste column in the sanitary landfill sites of the Mejía and Ambato cantons. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26907v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26907v1
Abstract
The leachate generated by the direct disposal of solid waste into the soil of terrace number one of the Romerillos sanitary landfill site contaminates the environment. This is visible from an average distance of up to 20m with the presence of dry vegetation cover showing infiltration by leachate and soil pollution in the surface and underground. Meanwhile, in the soil of terrace number one of the Ambato sanitary landfill site, the contaminated environment is visible from an average distance of 33m with the presence of dry vegetation cover. At both the Romerillos and the Ambato sanitary landfill sites, a quantification study of codified (Matlab) and spatial (ArcGis) variability of the characteristics, such as hydraulic load, pressure load and percentage of leachate, was carried out. Field data was collected for the Matlab simulation. For 10 specific GPS Navigator sampling points, the variables studied included infiltration speed, porosity, infiltration distance, Van Genuchten parameters and time. Estimation graphs were created for each variable at 10, 20, 30 and 40mins. Through the observation of the graphs obtained in Matlab, it was determined that the variable hydraulic load is inversely proportional to depth. It was also established that the behaviour of the pressure load is directly proportional to depth and percentage of leachate was inversely proportional to depth. All the variables analysed showed a normal behaviour due to the silty-clay soil type in the "Romerillos" sanitary landfill site and sandy-loam in the Ambato sanitary landfill site.
Author Comment
This (pre-print) version of the article was not submitted to elsewhere.
Supplemental Information
Matlab 10-minute script
To develop the numerical solution for the infiltration behaviour in the soil caused by leachate, we used mathematical software based on the Richards equation with which the simulations for the different simulation scenarios were obtained in the Matlab R2014a programme. This code was used to determine the graph of the three variables mentioned for the Ambato sanitary landfill site.