Journal of Emerging Trends in Engineering and Applied Sciences: Research Areas

Abstract:
This study to determine the barrier potential of iguoriakhi soil was borne out of the need to source for cheap material to use as liner for sanitary landfill. Since Iguoriakhi is located at the outskirt of Benin City, it constitutes a vertitable location to site a sanitary landfill. One critical consideration in the establishment of a sanitary landfill is ensuring that the the underground water body is protected from pollution and synthetic liner materials are usually expensive. The study seeks to find out if the location soil can be used as barrier material for a proposed sanitary landfill in the location.The geotechnical engineering properties of the soil samples were carried out.These include sieve analysis tests, specific gravity tests, Atterberg limits tests, consolidation tests, permeability test, , shear strenght test, California Bearing Ratio, chemical analysis and X-ray diffraction tests.The specific gravity value of the soil was found to be 2.21. The percentage of soil passing the No. 200 sieve was 96.27% which implies that there is no coarse material in the soil mix while the percentage passing through sieve 0.001mm (hydrometer test) is 31.414%, this indicates that the soil is finely graded. The Atterberg Limit test result shows that the Liquid limit of the soil is 69.58%, the Plastic Limit is 23.78g/cm3, the plasticity index is 45.80% while the linear shrinkage is 14.29%, the soil can be described as high plasticity clayey (CH) soil of fairly high swell shrinkage characteristics. The coefficient of permeability was ?08m/sec implying that the location soil is sufficiently clay have huge potential to be used as liner material for landfill. The tests and analyses reveal that the soil meets most of the established standards of liner materials according to the ASTM standards. This goes to show that Iguoriakhi soil has great potential to be used as barrier material for sanitary landfill. The implication of this is that sanitary landfill infrastructure can be designed and constructed with little or no cost burden on the aquisition of expensive synthetic material as liners.

Keywords: Sanitary Landfill, Iguoriakhi Soil, Barrier Material, Pollution, Liner Properties, Coefficient Of Permeability

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