1 AN UNDERGROUND ROBOTIC EQUIPMENT FOR LEACHATE DRAINING AND LANDFILLS REMEDIATION

The protection against environment pollution requests active actions for land remediation, with removal of pollutantnts and pathogenic agents. The waste landfills are incumbent dangers, with leachates polluting water beds. The fact is main concern of the EU and the enacted regulations requests decommissioning operations. Today techniques transfer and encapsulate the landfills, by expensive and humans unsafe methods, without fully cancelling out the leachate risk. This project overcomes the limitations of current solutions with resort to a mixed technique, mainly based on a robotic equipment, capable of creating a draining manifold through remotely operated fixtures. The technique combines micro-tunnelling technology, to create proper collecting lines under the landfill [1], with implantation in the waste bulk of the patented SIDRA® draining elements, to obtain a cost effective system for safe and final remediation of landfills. The SIDRA® pipes consist of hollow rods with draining slots covered by water soluble plastic caps, to prevent occlusion by the debris during drilling. To bring this concept into an exploitable industrial set-up, the project required the ideation and implementation of a reliable and effective robotic equipment, capable of moving and positioning within the small microtunnels, while accomplishing the drilling from the bottom, up to 20-30 m afar in the waste bulk with implantation of the piping system. No operator is allowed (nor would accept) to drill below leachate pools; thus the all task needs be fulfilled without human intervention. The paper gives details on the development of the drilling sequence and draining pipes implantation robot, with annexed local feeding, buffering and pre-setting modules and related monitoring and governing equipment. The SIDRA ® technique is registered method