Dynamic Properties of Municipal Solid Waste in Bioreactor Landfills with Degradation

Bioreactor landfills are operated to enhance refuse decomposition, gas production, and waste stabilization. The major aspect of bioreactor landfill operation is the recirculation of collected leachate back through the refuse mass. Due to the presence of additional leachate and accelerated decomposition, the characteristics of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in bioreactor landfills are expected to change. About 50% of the continental United States comes under the designated seismic impact zone. The federal regulations have focused increase attention on seismic design of solid waste fills, and have mandated that the solid waste landfills located in the seismic impact zones should be designed to resist the earthquake. Accordingly, assessment of dynamic properties of landfills is one of the major geotechnical tasks in landfill engineering. In order to understand the changes in dynamic properties of bioreactor waste mass with time and decomposition, four small scale bioreactor landfills were simulated in laboratory and samples were prepared to represent each phase of decomposition. The state of decomposition was quantified by methane yield, pH, and volatile organic content (VOC). A number of Resonant Column (RC) tests were performed to evaluate the dynamic properties (stiffness and damping) of MSW. The test results indicated that the normalized shear modulus reduction and damping curves are significantly affected by the degree of decomposition. The shear modulus increased from 2.11 MPa in Phase I to 12.56 MPa in Phase IV. The increase was attributed to the breakdown of fibrous nature of solid waste particles as it degrades. Therefore, considering MSW properties to be uniform throughout the bioreactor landfill is not a reasonable assumption and the shear modulus reduction curves should be evaluated based on the degree of MSW decomposition, rather than the sample composition itself.