Professional Documents
Culture Documents
T1 Introduction
1. Surface Water Quality Management
In an idealized setting, a community development will permit use of a watershed for
drinking water supply, for recreation and for the discharge of treated wastes.
T2 Watershed and beneficial uses [ask class to identify locations for each]
T3 Watershed and beneficial uses best case solution
T4 Everyone lives downstream
T5 Everyone lives downstream Sonora River
2. River Water Quality
T6 Discharges to rivers
T7 Engineering design to protect downstream stakeholders
Here we will consider the management of river oxygen resources as impacted by the
discharge of oxygen demanding wastes, i.e. BOD. The task is best summarized by
considering the battle between oxygen consumption (BOD exertion) and oxygen
replenishment (reaeration).
River DO-BOD Overview
First consider the fate of BOD (which behaves as a first-order decay) in a river after it
exits the mixing basin.
T8 First order BOD decay
Next consider the compensating effect of reaeration, the rate of which increases as the
oxygen concentration decreases. The net effect is a profile with distance downstream in
the river termed the dissolved oxygen sag curve.
T9 The DO Mass Balance and the DO Sag Curve (the battle for oxygen)
dO2
ka D k L L
dt
kLt
Type of sample
Untreated municipal
Treated municipal wastewater
Unpolluted river water
kL (day-1)
0.35 0.70
0.10 0.35
< 0.05
Returning to the oxygen mass balance, we note that since BOD is expressed in terms of
oxygen consumed (representation by effect), we can quantify the deoxygenation portion
of the dissolved oxygen mass balance using the first order BOD decay equation,
dO2
k L L
dt
T13 The DO Mass Balance and the DO sag curve
Consider the effects of L, kL and temperature on the sag curve.
yt L0 1 e kLt
yt
1 e kL t
The maximum amount of oxygen that the water can hold is termed the saturation
concentration and varies with temperature according to the Henrys Law,
DOsat K H PO2
The value for the Henrys Law constant for oxygen (K H) decreases as temperature
increases and thus the value of DOsat is lower at higher temperatures.
T15 Oxygen saturation and temperature
Reaeration is a first order reaction based on the reaeration rate coefficient, Ka (d -1), and a
driving force as represented by the dissolved oxygen deficit,
dO2
ka D
dt
The magnitude of the reaeration rate coefficient varies with temperature (increases with
increasing temperature) and the turbulence of the stream (increases with increasing
turbulence). Consider the effects of temperature and turbulence on the DO sag curve.
Quantifying the DO Mass Balance
We have now quantified all of the inputs to the DO mass balance,
dO2
ka D k L L
dt
In practice, the mass balance is written in terms of D because it is really D not DO that
drives the reaeration term,
dD
k L L ka D
dt
In order to apply this equation in modeling the oxygen resources of a river, the equation
must be integrated,
Dt
k1 L0
e k1 t e k2 t D0 e
k2 k1
k2 t
Remembering that protection of the system at the critical point protects the entire system,
T16 The DO Sag Curve and the Critical Point
we would like to know at what t does the critical point occur,
tcrit
k
D k k
1
ln 2 1 0 2 1
k
k2 k1
k1 L0
1
4. Groundwater Quality
What is groundwater
Sources and Types of Groundwater Contamination
For many years, the prevailing view was that contaminants released into the subsurface
would be cleansed by aquifer materials or diluted in the aquifer water. However, a wide
range of toxic substances, including synthetic organic chemicals, trace metals, and
pathogenic microorganisms, have been detected at potentially harmful levels in
groundwater and concern over subsurface contamination has grown.
Groundwater contaminants include:
Pathogens
Nutrients
Inorganic chemicals
Organic chemicals
Radionuclides
The release of groundwater contaminants may exhibit different areal and temporal
characteristics. For example, pathogens released from a septic tank may originate over a
small area, while pesticide applications may involve > 103 km2. Contaminant releases
may occur over a short time span, such as those associated with a single, essentially
instantaneous chemical spill, or over a longer time span (e.g. decades), such as leakage
from improperly stored chemical wastes. Knowledge of the areal and temporal extent of
a contaminant release is required in the design of remediation plans and preventative
measures.
Pollutant Fate and Transport in Groundwater
Transport in groundwater is mediated by advection and dispersion (diffusion plus
mechanical mixing). Since movement in the subsurface may occur in all three
dimensions simultaneously and can change in time and space, prediction of advective
transport can be quite complicated. However, in a simple, one-dimensional system where
groundwater flow is constant in time and space, the travel time of a contaminant over a
given length can be estimated as:
L
v
where t is the travel time (d), L is length (m) and v (m/d) is the pore (interstitial or
seepage) velocity.
t
The velocity is a function of the driving force for transport (hydraulic gradient, dh/dx,
dimensionless) and the resistance to that transport (hydraulic conductivity, K, m3m-2d-1).
This relationship,
vDarcy
Q
dh
K
A
dx
is based on the work of the French civil engineer Henri Darcy and is thus termed the
Darcy velocity.
Because the hydraulic conductivity is expressed in terms of the cross-section of the entire
aquifer and groundwater flows only through pores, calculation of the true velocity
requires normalization for porosity (n, dimensionless),
vtrue
1
dh vDarcy
K
n
dx
n
Because 0 n 1 , the true velocity will be always be greater than the Darcy velocity.
105 m/s
q
K dh
2
7
10 3.33 10 m/s
n
n dx
0.3
1, 000 m
L
3.00 109 s 95 yr
7
v 3.33 10 m/s
The long travel time calculated here underscores the fact that groundwater transport can
be slow and may suggest that we do not need to be concerned about the contamination for
a long time period. However, by the time the contamination might be detected at the
well, a large portion of the aquifer and a significant volume of groundwater may be
contaminated as the plume spreads.
Contaminants tend to spread out or mix (disperse) as they are advected with the flowing
groundwater, becoming more dilute and occupying an increasingly larger volume. This
second transport process, dispersion results from the effects of two mechanisms:
diffusion and mechanical mixing.
Diffusion is driven by concentration gradients, while mechanical mixing results from
interactions with the aquifers solid matrix (a process analogous to the eddy diffusion
discussed in relation to air and surface water). The contribution of mechanical mixing to
dispersion dominates that of diffusion except at low pore velocities (e.g. in aquifers with
low hydraulic conductivity).
The travel time calculation presented previously assumes that once the contaminant is
released, the contaminant molecules experience identical velocities as they migrate
through the aquifer. In fact, each molecule will be subject to velocities that can range
over many orders of magnitude due to mixing phenomena occurring over a wide range of
length scales. Velocity differences at the pore scale result from friction with the solid
media, an effect manifested to a different degree at different positions over the crosssection. Pore scale velocity differences are also influenced by the flow paths that
molecules travel as they migrate through the aquifer medium. At the aquifer scale,
variations in velocity are caused by differences in hydraulic conductivity resulting in
contaminant arrival at a particular location at different times.
The practical significance of this is that the travel time (for arrival of the front) is shorter
with dispersion than with advection alone. Referring again to the travel time calculation
presented previously, when the effects of dispersion are included, the contaminant
reaches the drinking supply water well at potentially toxic levels orders of magnitude
more quickly than with transport only by advection.
Groundwater contaminants rarely behave conservatively, as they may be degraded by
microorganisms, react chemically or lost as a result of physical processes (e.g.
volatilization, sorption). In many cases, contaminant reactions are beneficial, reducing
contaminant levels. However, in some cases (especially chlorinated solvents), the
reaction products can be at least as toxic as the chemical originally released.
Contaminant interactions with solid materials in the aquifer through sorption are
quantified through a retardation coefficient and serve to slow the rate of chemical
migration.
Groundwater Remediation Strategies
Contaminated groundwater is expensive and time consuming to clean up. This is because:
1) Pollution problems are often discovered years after the initial contamination, offering
the chemical time to impact millions of liters of water and extend kilometers from the
source.
2) The subsurface is physically and chemically heterogeneous. This
heterogeneity leads to slow rates of removal or in-place degradation of contaminants,
even when remediation is aggressive. 3) Little information is usually available
concerning the physical and chemical characteristics of the contaminated aquifer system.
The lack of information, coupled with aquifer heterogeneity and the fact that the
subsurface is essentially invisible, means that the design and implementation of
economical and effective remediation systems presents a challenge.
Groundwater remediation may be accomplished by physical, biological, or chemical
means. Physical remediation usually involves pumping the contaminated groundwater out
of the aquifer, treating it above-ground, and disposing the treated groundwater back to the
impacted aquifer, to a surface water, or to a wastewater collection system. Soil vapor
extraction and air sparging involve pumping and recovering air into and from the vadose
and saturated zones, respectively. Biological remediation consists of injecting electron
acceptors and nutrients. Chemical remediation also involves adding chemicals, to either
enhance abiotic degradation or to immobilize contaminants through chemical
precipitation.