FAQs

That traditional order of bottle-filling starts with what we call the most volatile to the least volatile. VOCs, SVOCs, metals, and filters is based on old research that used predominantly bailers for sampling.  If a bailer is pulled out of a well, you want to take the most volatile sample first since it has the greatest effect of changing that sample with time.  But if you’re pumping from a well at a low flow rate, under steady state conditions, and with stabilized indicator parameters then the bottle filling order no longer matters; what does matter is the flow rate.  So if you start out at a flow rate of 500 or 300 mL per minute and have larger bottles to fill, fill those first, then reduce the flow rate and fill smaller bottles, and finally, pause momentarily to install the filter, and take the filtered parameters.  So the old bottle filling order is still correct if you are using a bailer, but if you are using a low flow pump and a low flow approach, bottle filling order really goes from largest to smallest bottles. 

That can be a challenge. Because of differential settling on a landfill site you can end up with gas headers that were initially graded so to have spots where the liquid could be dropped out, but now, you have low spots or low-lying areas where the liquid can actually block off the piping. If your issue is liquid accumulating in the pipe because of a low point the only solution is to repair the pipe. It has to be lifted or replaced in order to get that area to flow properly.  But, managing the liquid in the header system is either done through what is called a condensate sump dropout or a drip leg. This is basically a vertical pipe of some sort that is attached to the horizontal headers and drilled down a few feet into the ground.  It’s a point for liquid to accumulate or “drop out” of the header line. Now the liquid moving through the pipe will fall into the dropout tank and you just install a single pump down in that tank to keep the sump itself dewatered.

Not always. We generally see some increase in gas flow, but the amount of increase can vary. It’s dependent on how long the gas well was watered in. If the gas well has been watered in for a fairly long period of time, the accumulation of biosolids and biomass as well as silt within the gas well can control whether or not we can get that well to perform at its previous levels. A couple of papers published on this subject have shown that gas flow increases can range all the way from a 100% original gas output to as much as 20% to 30% of original gas output. If a site is considering using pumps to improve gas collection, there needs to be a measurement of the liquid levels in the existing wells to determine how much of the perforated section of the well is currently exposed.  For example, if you have a well with 30 meters perforated pipe and 20 meters of that pipe are currently watered in, you can do a gas flow test on the existing open portion of the screen and get an estimate of how many cubic meters of gas per hour can be produced with the existing portion of the screen. From there you can estimate how much additional gas might be produced by dewatering. Try to use a conservative factor because it’s not very linear. For example, if we got to 20 cubic meters of gas per hour from a given well and we had two thirds of the well watered in, we might be able to raise that to 30 to 35 cubic meters by dewatering. We may not get as high as 50 or 60 cubic meters per hour.

There have been several papers published in the U.S., as well as a couple of International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) conferences on the topic of sudden gas pressures and problems with leachate seeps both out of the sides of landfills as well as pulling or pounding on top of the landfill. The formation is related to two things, the age of the leachate itself (as it ages it tends to form more), but also the amount of gas that is accumulated in the sides. In general, what we see is an interesting cycle of very high shut-in gas pressure so the wells are dewatered, but when they’re dewatered more gas starts flowing into the wells and then gas and liquids are literally being blown out of the wells, even where the pumps are installed. This sort of a cycle of continued dewatering followed by pulling of gas needs to occur to get the system to settle down.  Eventually the liquid levels get down low enough that there will be a nice and steady gas flow and the foaming and surging problems will be eliminated.

It is possible, and the reason would be accelerating gas production or biodegradation. If you have liquid present, you may have slowed the degradation of waste. If you remove the liquid you could see some increased rate of gas generation or degradation such that you would see an increase in temperature.

There are different types of chlorinated compounds so you have to look at each compounds – it's probably not useful to try to talk about an entire class of compounds. The on-line process model has more than 100 different VOCs available for process simulation.

The best thing to do is to run a pilot study and adjust the Henry's constants accordingly, this way you will get a large enough stripper to deal with the actual conditions.

The VOCs from the water go into the air, which can generally be discharged without any treatment in drinking water applications since the VOC concentrations in water are usually very low (low part per billion range) and greatly diluted by the high air to water ratio.

QED can provide UL-listed industrial control panels and we have done designs that interface the stripper with existing plant SCADA systems. If you need a control panel with your system, QED will work with you on what’s required to control your specific process.