Numerical modeling of the long term behavior of Municipal Solid Waste in a bioreactor landfill

This paper presents a thermo-hydro-biochemo-mechanical model for simulating the long term behavior of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in a bioreactor landfill, in which the multi-physics coupling mechanism plays a dominant role. In the model, a two-stage anaerobic biochemical model based on McDougall’s formulation is incorporated into a fully coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical models originally developed for unsaturated porous medium. The mechanical model is a modified Camclay model allowing for biochemical hardening/softening, while the thermal model is described by a classical energy balance equation with a source term accounting for the heat generation from the biodegradation of organic matter. The hydraulic model is an unsaturated flow model using Richard’s equation. The derived coupled model is implemented into an in-house built multi-physics finite element code. Finally, numerical simulations were performed to illustrate the capability of the proposed model for estimating long-term settlement of a bioreactor landfill and its aptitude as a landfill management tool for optimizing the landfill operation.