T. Matthew Evans, Ph.D.
Nina Stark
(Ed.)
One of the major purposes of landfill final covers is to minimize the infiltration of precipitation into the underlying waste. Deployment of conventional clay covers, geosynthetic clay liner, evapotranspiration (ET) covers, etc., has mostly been in practice to achieve the purposes. However, they have their shortcomings in the full attainment of the goals. In recent years, engineered turf has been introduced for landfill closure as a precipitation barrier to enhance cover performance. However, the field demonstration of engineered turf cover as the infiltration barrier is very limited. Soil moisture being one of the performance indicators of landfill covers, the objective of this study was to investigate moisture distribution characteristics of three distinct prototype landfill final cover systems: ET cover, compacted clay cover, and engineered turf cover, under in a humid subtropical climatic region. All the test covers (3 m × 3 m) were constructed side by side and were instrumented with moisture sensors at shallow depth (0.3 m depth). Descriptive statistics and histograms were used to summarize the features of the moisture distribution. Gaussian distribution theorem was used to investigate the spread out of the moisture data. In addition, the original moisture data were transformed to the standard normal distribution for a consistent framework for investigating the moisture variability of different covers. The analysis showed that 95% of the data were clustered around 0.173 to 0.238 m3/m3 at 0.3 m depth of engineered turf cover. On the contrary, the other two covers’ soil had a similar wider spread out of moisture data ranging approximately from 0.041 to 0.34 m3/m3. Results obtained from this study indicated the efficiency of engineered turf cover as an effective barrier to precipitation.
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