Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos was a keynote speaker at the Third International Symposium on Coupled Phenomena in Environmental Geotechnics, an international event organized by the Technical Committee 215 on Environmental Geotechnics of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering. 

The conference is held every four years, and was going to be hosted in person in Kyoto, Japan. Due to COVID it was postponed to 20-21 October 2021 and switched to virtual. 

Zekkos presentation is accompanied by a paper that was co-authored by past PhD students Sampurna Datta and Xuchang Fei and was titled: "Coupled processes modeling for energy generation from municipal solid waste degradation: Laboratory-scale and field-scale simulations". The paper is published by the Japanese Geotechnical Society and is available in open access here.

The abstract of the paper reads: 

"Modern regulated landfills are designed to protect the environment by containing and isolating municipal solid waste (MSW) from the environment. Instead of treating MSW as a hazard to be contained, next generation landfills, here termed Sustainable Energy Reactor Facilities (SERFs) are envisioned to be designed and operated with a main focus on energy generation (through anaerobic biodegradation processes) and sustainability. Towards this vision, a coupled hydraulic-biochemical-mechanical model that is based on the HBM model, is implemented in large laboratory-scale and field-scale studies to simulate the degradation process of MSW. The model captures the consumption of biodegradable organic fraction in the waste by microorganisms, eventually leading to biogas generation and changing solid waste and leachate characteristics. The model was first tested against 0.04 cubic meter laboratory experiments to assess its ability to predict the observed behavior and derive values for the various model parameters. Subsequently, the model is implemented on a 37 cubic meter field lysimeter at Deer Track Park Landfill. The presented data indicates that the model has the capacity to be implemented in field scale and generate geospatially variable estimates of methane (i.e., energy) yield."

More information on Prof. Zekkos' research on generating energy from Municipal Solid Waste can be found here