Assessment of municipal solid waste settlement models based on field-scale data analysis

Area of Science:

• Geotechnical Engineering
• Environmental Engineering
• Waste Management

Background:

• Accurate modeling of municipal solid waste (MSW) settlement is crucial for landfill design and management.
• Existing MSW settlement models vary in complexity, compression behavior representation, and parameter requirements.
• Field-scale data from Yolo and Deer Track Bioreactor Experiment (DTBE) provide valuable insights into waste settlement dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the performance and applicability of twelve different MSW settlement models.
• To assess models considering immediate compression, mechanical creep, and biocompression.
• To identify the most statistically robust and parameter-efficient settlement model for MSW.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of two field-scale datasets: Yolo and Deer Track Bioreactor Experiment (DTBE).
• Application of twelve MSW settlement models with varying compression behaviors and parameter counts.
• Utilized least squares optimization for model parameterization and performance evaluation (R²).

Main Results:

• All models coupling immediate, creep, and biocompression accurately represented both Yolo and DTBE datasets (R² > 0.83).
• Empirical models (power creep, logarithmic, hyperbolic) are not recommended due to limited physical significance and data dependency.
• The Gourc et al. (2010) model demonstrated superior performance (R² ≥ 0.97) with the fewest total and optimized parameters.

Conclusions:

• Models integrating multiple compression processes (immediate, creep, biocompression) are essential for accurate MSW settlement prediction.
• The Gourc et al. (2010) model is highly recommended for its statistical performance and parsimony.
• Careful selection of settlement models is vital, avoiding empirical models with limited long-term predictive capability.