Modelagem matemática aplicada a dispersão de poluentes em aterros sanitários

Abstract

Groundwater plays a crucial role in maintaining ecosystems, often serving as the primary source of drinking water for numerous communities. Many regions rely on these underground reservoirs to meet domestic, agricultural, and industrial demands. Therefore, preserving both the quality and quantity of groundwater is essential to ensure water security, foster biodiversity, and promote environmental sustainability. The present work aims to study the propagation of contaminants in landfills, with the goal of observing how groundwater can be affected by these pollutants. Hence, the dimensionless form of the two-dimensional model will be considered, as well as the continuous and uniform leakage of contaminants from a cell of municipal solid waste (MSW) storage. The adopted model was solved using two methods. The first method applied the Generalized Integral Laplace Transform Technique (GILTT), where the solution obtained is considered analytical, except for the truncation error in the infinite series. The second method used the Separation of Variables, a widely employed approach in solving partial differential equations that also provides an analytical representation of the problem. The results present an analysis of the model parameters to verify their influence on the distribution of contaminant concentration and how groundwater can be affected. As expected, the results show that GILTT satisfactorily represented the observed data and there is good agreement between the analytical methods. There is also a certain advantage of the Separation of Variables solution over GILTT, as it involves fewer processes to obtain the final solution, resulting in lower computational costs.