Quantifying geomembrane wrinkles using aerial photography and digital image processing

摘要

ABSTRACT: Geomembranes are highly effective barriers, and are often a key component in thendesign of composite landfill liner and cover systems. During installation, solar exposure causesnsome types of geomembrane to buckle locally upwards and form networks of wrinkles (sometimesnreferred to as waves). These wrinkle networks may be significant in terms of increasing leakagenthrough this barrier system if there is a hole at or near the wrinkle. In this paper, a novel methodnto quantify geomembrane wrinkles in the field is reported using low-altitude aerial digitalnphotography and image processing techniques. The results of the analysis indicate that, at the datenand time the aerial image was captured, the geomembrane contained 100 major wrinkles, whichncovered 13.9% of the total area of the exposed geomembrane. More importantly from a potentialnleakage perspective, over 90% of these wrinkles were found to be hydraulically connected over thenentire field of view of the exposed geomembrane. This one hydraulically connected wrinkle wasnfound to have an aggregate length of 520 m.