Modelling water flow through a multilayered cover liner for a waste dump.

Abstract

When a waste dump or landfill reaches its full capacity, a cover liner is employed as a last measure to isolate the potentially harmful waste from the environment. Once of the main functions of a cover liner is to prevent water from entering the waste thereby preventing any additional risk of groundwater pollution. Cover liners are usually constructed from various soil layers and therefore it is important to understand the behaviour of infiltrating water through such soil structures. In the past, numerical models have dealt predominantly with vertical infiltration and infiltration into sloping hillsides which are infinite in extent, in an attempt to understand flow phenomena through cover liners. The numerical model presented in this paper will deal with water flow through a more realistically shaped cover liner to expand our understanding of flow through sloping layered soils and multi-layered cover liner systems.