Experimental study of migration of potassium ion through a two-layer soil system

A barrier system based on the hydraulic trap design concept for a landfill was proposed. To study the field scenario in which a clay liner is underlain by a granular layer functioning as a secondary leachate drain layer, a laboratory advection–diffusion test was performed to investigate factors controlling the transport of contaminants in a two-layer soil system. The soils used for this study were Ariake clay and, the underlying layer, Shirasu soil from the Kyushu region of Japan. Potassium (K+) was selected as the target chemical species with an initial concentration of 905 mg L−1. The effective diffusion coefficients (De) of K+ for Ariake clay and Shirasu soil were back-calculated using an available computer program, PolluteV 6.3. Values of De derived from this experiment are consistent with previously published ones. The Ariake clay has lower De than the Shirasu soil. The hypothesis that mechanical dispersion can be considered negligible is reasonable based on both the observation that the predicted values well fit the experimental data and the analyses of two dimensionless parameters. Parametric analyses show that transport of K+ through soils is controlled by advection–diffusion rather than diffusion only, whereas at low Darcy velocity (i.e., ≤10−9 m s−1), transport of K+ will be controlled by diffusion. Applications of the test results and parametric analysis results in practical situations were reviewed.