Dynamic Modeling of an Evapotranspiration Cap

The U.S. Department of Energy is scheduled to design and install hundreds of landfill caps/barriers over the next several decades and these caps will have a design life expectancy of up to 1,000 years. Other landfill caps with 30 year design lifetimes are reaching the end of their original design life; the changes to these caps need to be understood to provide a basis for lifetime extension. Defining the attributes that make a successful cap (one that isolates the waste from the environment) is crucial to these efforts. Because cap systems such as landfill caps are dynamic in nature, it is impossible to understand, monitor, and update lifetime predictions without understanding the dynamics of cap degradation, which is most often due to multiple interdependent factors rather than isolated independent events. In an attempt to understand the dynamics of cap degradation, a computer model using system dynamics is being developed to capture the complex behavior of an evapotranspiration cap. The specific objectives of this project are to capture the dynamic, nonlinear feedback loop structures underlying an evapotranspiration cap and, through computer simulation, gain a better understanding of long-term behavior, influencing factors, and, ultimately, long-term cap performance