Authors : Faeiza Buyong, MohdSuzairiff Zainal and NurulAtikahMohd Fozi
Abstract: Methane oxidation is one of the important processes to mitigate the emission of methane gas at landfill to the environment. This study investigated the effect of moisture content in order to enhance the methane oxidation of final cover soil from Taman Medan Dumpsite. Three different PVC soil columns contained cover soils with moisture content of 7, 12 and 28% were used in this study. The columns were purged with the mixture of methane gas (60% by volume) and carbon dioxide gas (40% by volume) from the bottom of the soil columns. The mixture gas passing through the soil media was retrieved from the columns daily via sampling ports fabricated at every 10 cm of the column height. The soil cover was classified as sandy silt contained 56% of sand, 32% of silt and 12% of clay. It also had 12% of moisture content, bulk density of 0.229 g cm–3, particle bulk density of 0.0304 g cm–3, pH of 7.21, colour of dark yellowish brown, porosity of 86.72% and organic matter of 1.5%. Gas chromatography analysed the collected gas had showed that methane oxidation effectively occurred in the column with 12% of moisture content that the average methane oxidation efficiency of the 7 day experiment was 47.97%. However, the methane oxidation efficiency in the other two columns with 7 and 28% of moisture content was significantly lower with only 8.93 and 7.87% of efficiency. The analyses also showed highest methane oxidation efficiency by average, took place at the height of 80 cm of those columns.
Faeiza Buyong, MohdSuzairiff Zainal and NurulAtikahMohd Fozi, 2015. Preliminary Study of Methane Oxidation in Landfill Cover Soil: The Effect of Moisture Content. Research Journal of Applied Sciences, 10: 598-602.