Download or read book ESTIMATING FATE AND TRANSPORT OF MULTIPLE CONTAMINANTS IN THE VADOSE ZONE USING A MULTI LAYERED SOIL COLUMN AND THREE PHASE EQUILIBRIUM PARTITIONING MODEL written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soils at waste sites must be evaluated for the potential of residual soil contamination to leach and migrate to the groundwater beneath the disposal area. If migration to the aquifer occurs, contaminants can travel vast distances and contaminate drinking water wells, thus exposing human receptors to harmful levels of toxins and carcinogens. To prevent groundwater contamination, a contaminant fate and transport analysis is necessary to assess the migration potential of residual soil contaminates. This type of migration analysis is usually performed using a vadose zone model to account for complex geotechnical and chemical variables including: contaminant decay, infiltration rate, soil properties, vadose zone thickness, and chemical behavior. The distinct advantage of using a complex model is that less restrictive, but still protective, soil threshold levels may be determined avoiding the unnecessary and costly remediation of marginally contaminated soils. However, the disadvantage of such modeling is the additional cost for data collection and labor required to apply these models. In order to allay these higher costs and to achieve a less restrictive but still protective clean-up level, a multiple contaminant and multi layered soil column equilibrium partitioning model was developed which is faster, simpler and less expensive to use.
Download or read book Predicting Fate and Transport of Contaminants in the Vadose Zone Using a Soil Screening Model written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 5 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soil Screening Levels (SSLs) are threshold concentrations below which there is no concern for the migration of residual soil contaminants to the aquifer above maximum contaminant levels (MCLs). At sites where contaminant concentrations exceed SSLs, further study maybe warranted under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). SSLs are based upon simplified fate and transport assumptions, but the guidance allows the flexibility to develop a detailed modeling approach that accounts for complex site variables such as degradation and thickness of the vadose zone. The distinct advantage of the detailed modeling is that individual sites may calculate a less restrictive, but still protective SSL. A Multi-Layer Vadose Zone Contaminant Migration Model [VZCOMML(C)] was developed at the Savannah River Site to allay the higher costs of detailed modeling and achieve a higher clean-up level. The software model is faster, simpler, and less expensive to us e than other commercially available codes.
Download or read book Soil Screening Guidance written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Screening Level Model for Vadose Zone and Ground Water Transport Evaluation written by MD. Edlund and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper hypothesizes that equations used by numerous screening models to calculate ground water mixing zone depth are conceptually incorrect. The models incorrectly omit contaminated infiltration volumes in calculating the resulting aquifer contaminant mixing and concentrations. As a consequence dilution factor, DF, and site cleanup criteria are also calculated incorrectly. The paper proposes a conservative, yet more reliable, method of estimating dilution factor which takes into account mixing by a receptor point pumping well and downward contaminant displacement due to natural infiltration. Aquifer contaminant concentrations are calculated at the down-gradient edge of the vadose zone source's planar projection on the water table. Processes addressed include advection, degradation, sorption, and volatilization. Using a spreadsheet setup, model equations allow the user to quickly evaluate multiple modeling scenarios with varying source geometry, vadose zone thickness, and soil heterogeneity.
Download or read book Simulating radionuclide fate and transport in the unsaturated zone evaluation and sensitivity analyses of select computer models written by Jin-Song Chen and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Unsaturated zone Modeling written by R.A. Feddes and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2004-10-11 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mankind has manipulated the quantity and quality of soil water for millennia. Food production was massively increased through fertilization, irrigation and drainage. But malpractice also caused degradation of immense areas of once fertile land, rendering it totally unproductive for many generations. In populated areas, the pollutant load ever more often exceeds the soil’s capacity for buffering and retention, and large volumes of potable groundwater have been polluted or are threatened to be polluted in the foreseeable future. In the past decades, the role of soil water in climate patterns has been recognized but not yet fully understood. The soil-science community responded to this diversity of issues by developing numerical models to simulate the behavior of water and solutes in soils. These models helped improve our understanding of unsaturated-zone processes and develop sustainable land-management practices. Aimed at professional soil scientists, soil-water modelers, irrigation engineers etc., this book discusses our progress in soil-water modeling. Top scientists present case studies, overviews and analyses of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to soil-water modeling. The contributions cover a wide range of spatial scales, and discuss fundamental aspects of unsaturated-zone modeling as well as issues related to the application of models to real-world problems.
Download or read book Bioavailability of Contaminants in Soils and Sediments written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2003-05-03 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bioavailability refers to the extent to which humans and ecological receptors are exposed to contaminants in soil or sediment. The concept of bioavailability has recently piqued the interest of the hazardous waste industry as an important consideration in deciding how much waste to clean up. The rationale is that if contaminants in soil and sediment are not bioavailable, then more contaminant mass can be left in place without creating additional risk. A new NRC report notes that the potential for the consideration of bioavailability to influence decision-making is greatest where certain chemical, environmental, and regulatory factors align. The current use of bioavailability in risk assessment and hazardous waste cleanup regulations is demystified, and acceptable tools and models for bioavailability assessment are discussed and ranked according to seven criteria. Finally, the intimate link between bioavailability and bioremediation is explored. The report concludes with suggestions for moving bioavailability forward in the regulatory arena for both soil and sediment cleanup.
Download or read book Conceptual Models of Flow and Transport in the Fractured Vadose Zone written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2001-05-21 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fluid flow and solute transport within the vadose zone, the unsaturated zone between the land surface and the water table, can be the cause of expanded plumes arising from localized contaminant sources. An understanding of vadose zone processes is, therefore, an essential prerequisite for cost-effective contaminant remediation efforts. In addition, because such features are potential avenues for rapid transport of chemicals from contamination sources to the water table, the presence of fractures and other channel-like openings in the vadose zone poses a particularly significant problem, Conceptual Models of Flow and Transport in the Fractured Vadose Zone is based on the work of a panel established under the auspices of the U.S. National Committee for Rock Mechanics. It emphasizes the importance of conceptual models and goes on to review the conceptual model development, testing, and refinement processes. The book examines fluid flow and transport mechanisms, noting the difficulty of modeling solute transport, and identifies geochemical and environmental tracer data as important components of the modeling process. Finally, the book recommends several areas for continued research.
Download or read book Modeling Chemical Transport in Soils written by Hossein Ghadiri and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 1992-09-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modeling Chemical Transport in Soils: Natural and Applied Contaminants provides a comprehensive discussion of mathematical models used to anticipate and predict the consequences and fate of natural and applied chemicals. The book evaluates the strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities for application of numerous models used throughout the world. It examines the theoretical support and need for experimental calibration for each model. The book also reviews world literature to discuss such topics as the movement of sorbed chemicals by soil erosion, the movement of reactive and nonreactive chemicals in the subsurface and groundwater, and salt transport in the landscape. Modeling Chemical Transport in Soils: Natural and Applied Contaminants is an important volume for environmental scientists, agricultural engineers, regulatory personnel, farm managers, consultants, and the chemical industry.
Download or read book Monitoring in the Vadose Zone written by Lorne Graham Wilson and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contaminants in the Subsurface written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-04-23 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At hundreds of thousands of commercial, industrial, and military sites across the country, subsurface materials including groundwater are contaminated with chemical waste. The last decade has seen growing interest in using aggressive source remediation technologies to remove contaminants from the subsurface, but there is limited understanding of (1) the effectiveness of these technologies and (2) the overall effect of mass removal on groundwater quality. This report reviews the suite of technologies available for source remediation and their ability to reach a variety of cleanup goals, from meeting regulatory standards for groundwater to reducing costs. The report proposes elements of a protocol for accomplishing source remediation that should enable project managers to decide whether and how to pursue source remediation at their sites.
Download or read book Characterization of Contaminant Transport by Gravity Capillarity and Barometric Pumping in Heterogeneous Vadose Zones written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This final report summarizes the work and accomplishments of our three-year project. We have pursued the concept of a Vadose-Zone Observatory (VZO) to provide the field laboratory necessary for carrying out the experiments required to achieve the goals of this research. Our approach has been (1) to carry out plume release experiments at a VZO allowing the acquisition of several different kinds of raw data that (2) are analyzed and evaluated with the aid of highly detailed, diagnostic numerical models. The key feature of the VZO constructed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is the variety of plume-tracking techniques that can be used at a single location. Electric resistance tomography (ERT) uses vertical arrays of electrodes across the vadose zone that can monitor electrical resistance changes in the soil as a plume moves downward to the water table. These resistance changes can be used to provide ''snapshots'' of the progress of the plume. Additionally, monitoring wells have been completed at multiple levels in the vicinity of a central infiltration site. Sensors emplaced at different levels include electrically conducting gypsum blocks for detecting saturation changes, thermistors for monitoring temperature changes and pressure transducers for observing barometric changes at different levels in the vadose regime. The data from these sensors are providing important information about the state of the gas- and liquid-phase dynamics of the infiltration process. Similarly, access ports at different levels have been used to supply gas-phase samples while lysimeters yield liquid-phase samples. Studies involving gas-phase tracers were carried out at LLNL and at an Orange County Water District site in southern California to evaluate the time-dependent chemical signature of a plume that was spiked with an array of dissolved noble-gas tracers. Our work also correlate chemical signatures with those of the above-mentioned sensors that track the physical changes in the vadose zone. From the VZO at the LLNL site and from 3-D diagnostic simulations of our very first tracer-spiked plume infiltration event, we produced a much better understanding of the implications of soil heterogeneity for unsaturated zone contaminant transport at DOE sites. Even though the LLNL VZO site is considered to be hydrologically ''tight'' owing to the low permeability of the clays and silts that dominate the soil formations there, we find that saturation increases resulting from a near-surface ''leak'' reach the water table across the 20-meter-thick vadose zone in only tens of hours. This rapid transport at the site cannot be accurately simulated by layered models that derive their hydrologic properties from borehole-soil samples. In the LLNL vadose zone, layered infiltration models clearly underpredict of the rate of contaminant infiltration to the water table. Chemical transport simulations based on layered models of the Hanford vadose zone also appear to drastically underpredict contaminant migration. Furthermore, only simulations assuming a heterogeneous regime ''threaded'' by extremely high-permeability pathways can explain the rapid increase in saturation observed with ERT near the water table. Three-dimensional predictive models of a hypothetical tritiated water leak that are based on the above mentioned VZO infiltration-experiment diagnostic models were run. Tritiated water is an excellent conservative tracer and the infiltration simulations predict, in very good agreement with VZO experiments, that a continuous hypothetical tritium release (2-3 liters/rein) would be expected to reach the water table at significant concentrations within days. The numerical model suggests that this arrival time is determined by the amount of time required, infiltrating liquid at a given rate, to flush one pore volume in the soil between the infiltration point and the water table. Another infiltration event monitored by ERT demonstrated that infiltration could occur even more rapidly (within hours) as a result of apparent ''fastpaths'' in the inhomogeneous soil regime. Because heterogeneity and ''fast paths'' are so important for understanding the transport of contaminants to the water table and such pathways are inherently three-dimensional, one- and even two-dimensional models of layered soils, as have sometimes been used at Hanford, are likely to be inadequate for evaluating vadose zone transport processes.
Download or read book Aqueous Phase Transport in Soils Contaminated with a Multi Component Liquid Hydrocarbon and Subjected to Vapor Flow written by Michael David Annable and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modeling Fate and Transport of Contaminants in the Vadose Zone written by Simin Akbariyeh and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, three-dimensional numerical models were developed to simulate water flow and solute transport in variably saturated porous media and were integrated with well-controlled field measurements to validate their performance.
Download or read book The Handbook of Groundwater Engineering written by John H. Cushman and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 1092 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition adds several new chapters and is thoroughly updated to include data on new topics such as hydraulic fracturing, CO2 sequestration, sustainable groundwater management, and more. Providing a complete treatment of the theory and practice of groundwater engineering, this new handbook also presents a current and detailed review of how to model the flow of water and the transport of contaminants both in the unsaturated and saturated zones, covers the protection of groundwater, and the remediation of contaminated groundwater.
Download or read book Monitored Natural Attenuation of Inorganic Contaminants in Ground Water written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V.3 ... consists of individual chapters that describe 1) the conceptual background for radionuclides, including tritium, radon, strontium, technetium, uranium, iodine, radium, thorium, cesium, plutonium-americium and 2) data requirements to be met during site characterization.
Download or read book Computational Methods in Subsurface Flow written by Peter S. Huyakorn and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2012-12-02 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computational Methods in Subsurface Flow explores the application of all of the commonly encountered computational methods to subsurface problems. Among the problems considered in this book are groundwater flow and contaminant transport; moisture movement in variably saturated soils; land subsidence and similar flow and deformation processes in soil and rock mechanics; and oil and geothermal reservoir engineering. This book is organized into 10 chapters and begins with an introduction to partial differential and various solution approaches used in subsurface flow. The discussion then shifts to the fundamental theory of the finite element method, with emphasis on the Galerkin finite element method and how it can be used to solve a wide range of subsurface problems. The subjects treated range from simple problems of saturated groundwater flow to more complex ones of moisture movement and multiphase flow in petroleum reservoirs. The chapters that follow focus on fluid flow and mechanical deformation of conventional and fractured porous media; point and subdomain collocation techniques and the boundary element technique; and the applications of finite difference techniques to single- and multiphase flow and solute transport. The final chapter is devoted to other alternative numerical methods that are based on combinations of the standard finite difference approach and classical mathematics. This book is intended for senior undergraduate and graduate students in geoscience and engineering, as well as for professional groundwater hydrologists, engineers, and research scientists who want to solve or model subsurface problems using numerical techniques.
