Engineering Properties of Soil Immersed in Heavy Fuel Oil Waste

The power production industries often use gas turbines running on diesel oil, crude oil, or heavy fuel oil (HFO); the use of HFO in the gas power plants needs a sequence of treating processes in a particular treating unit. The HFO processes for treating produce large quantities of the wastewater due to the different treatment stages that, in most, are physical, and the resulted wastewater is called the HFO Waste. The common disposal method that majorly used in getting rid of the HFO waste is the ground pits or pools (directly on the natural soil surface) that work as large reservoirs to keep the large quantities of the outcome HFO Waste in order to re-consuming it for another utility or as a permanent disposing method. In this research, an extensive laboratory testing program was carried out to determine the effects of HFO waste on some of the geotechnical properties of different gypsum soils (slightly, moderately, and highly gypseous soil). The samples were extruded from different positions around the pool area at the Baiji Power Plant site and at different depths (1.0-3.0 m). The testing program includes basic soil properties, direct shear, compressibility, and collapsibility on natural and polluted soil samples at the same densities. The polluted samples were chosen at different saturation levels (10, 50, and 100) % respectively. The results showed an increase in the internal friction angle to its maximum value at a low degree of waste saturation, then going down, the cohesion is zero or negligible. Polluted soil had a compression index less than the compression index for non-polluted soil. The collapse potential for HFO waste flooded soils is higher than that of soils flooded with water.