Analytical modeling of groundwater contamination under uncertainty

• Main Author: He, Yujun
• Other Authors: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Environmental engineering::Environmental pollution
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/61185

Groundwater contamination is considered to be one of the most significant ecological and health problems. The contaminant released from the source will move down-gradient of the groundwater flow and greatly affects the general environmental features of large regions and drinking water supply conditions in many countries (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 1987). This project will adopt a case study in Western Canada to review a groundwater contaminant transport modeling and establish a human health risk assessment. To modeling groundwater contaminant transport under uncertainty, the three-dimensional analytical model proposed by Huyakorn et al. (1987) and Monte Carlo simulation will be adopted and applied to a case study. For more efficient and accurate analyzing, computer software called MATLAB will be employed to be the platform of simulation. Furthermore, a human health risk assessment which include hazard identification, exposure assessment, toxicity assessment and risk characterization will be conducted in this report to predicting human ingestion exposure and its corresponding risk to get a cancer. In the assessment, a exposure calculation model and a cancer risk calculation model came up from USEPA will be adopted for calculation. As it requires parameters of different age intervals, the likelihood calculated is very high and it can be used to determine whether actions should be taken to clean up the groundwater contamination.