Impact of biological clogging on the barrier performance of landfill liners

Qiang Tang, Fan Gu, Yu Zhang, Yuqing Zhang, Jialin Mo

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The durability of landfill mainly relies on the anti-seepage characteristic of liner system. The accumulation of microbial biomass is effective in reducing the hydraulic conductivity of soils. This study aimed at evaluating the impact of the microorganism on the barrier performance of landfill liners. According to the results, Escherichia coli. produced huge amounts of extracellular polymeric substances and coalesced to form a confluent plugging biofilm. This microorganism eventually resulted in the decrease of soil permeability by 81%–95%. Meanwhile, the increase of surface roughness inside the internal pores improved the adhesion between microorganism colonization and particle surface. Subsequently, an extensive parametric sensitivity analysis was undertaken for evaluating the contaminant transport in landfill liners. Decreasing the hydraulic conductivity from 1 × 10−8 m/s to 1 × 10−10 m/s resulted in the increase of the breakthrough time by 345.2%. This indicates that a low hydraulic conductivity was essential for the liner systems to achieve desirable barrier performance.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)44-53
JournalJournal of Environmental Management
Volume222
Early online date23 May 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2018

Bibliographical note

© 2018, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Funding: The study is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (51708377),
Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20170339), Natural Science Fund for
Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province (17KJB560008), project from Jiangsu Provincial
Department of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (2016ZD18, 2017ZD002), and Jiangsu
Provincial Transport Bureau (2016T05).

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