Electrical Leak Detection System in a Waste Disposal Site with Man-Made Liners

Waste at controlled landfill disposal sites is a potential cause of environmental pollution or risk and the detection of leakages through man-made liners in waste disposal site has become increasingly important in the last few years. We applied the electrical survey technique to develop a simple and convenient system to detect leakages in waste disposal site with man-made liners. The leakage detection system, which uses permanently installed electrode array under the liner, detects effectively an electrical potential distortion caused by perforations in the liner. Moreover, the potential data obtained under the liner was transformed into a relative current data which has better resolution in locating the leakage point. Also, we developed a simple weighting method which can estimate quantitatively the amount of leakages.