Loretta Batali is full professor and habilitated for PhD research at the Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest (UTCB), Department of Geotechnics and Foundations and Director of the Council For Doctoral Studies. She graduated the Hydraulic Works Faculty of UTCB in 1990, then she obtained a Master degree in 1993 and her PhD degree in 1997, both from INSA Lyon France (with a PhD thesis on the Use of geosynthetic clay liners for landfills).
Topics of interest: Soil mechanics, Foundation engineering, Landfills, Geosynthetics, Retaining structures, Unsaturated soils, Slope stability
She is appointed as technical expert and verifier for Geotechnics and Foundation domain (Af) by the Public Works Ministry. She has a rich technical activity and she authored several technical norms.  She is involved in the revision of the Eurocode 7 at CEN (TC 250/SC7), as member of PT1 and leading TG B on design examples.  She is also member of the Romanian Association for Geosynthetics (ARG), after serving for 10 years as scientific secretary and also member of the International Geosynthetics Society (IGS) and of the CEN TC 189 – Geosynthetics.

Ειδική Ομιλία

Aspects related to slope stability of waste landfills - case studies and numerical modelling

Loretta Batali, Professor of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering, Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest, Romania

Instability phenomena in waste landfills are not rare, even if the level of knowledge and awareness increased in the last years. But insufficient knowledge about the characteristics of the waste and poor execution, associated to insufficient geotechnical investigation of the sites and the use of inappropriate sites lead to many cases of landfills instability. This can be seen for new landfills, as for old ones. Old waste dumps are often located in dried (or partially dried) valleys, natural gulches or ravines, therefore waste is often placed on sloped ground. Their mechanical characteristics are often very poor and, due to lack of drainage systems, are in saturated state. Therefore, instability can appear at every stage of the operation, during the closure or post-closing. When consolidation works are foreseen drainage measures are always considered, which will change the saturation state of waste to an unsaturated one. Paper presents general aspects about slope stability in landfills, some case studies from Romania and a 3D numerical modelling in saturated and unsaturated conditions for the closure of an old landfill.