Contaminant migration in fractured soils
Soil is used as a recipient of waste in various forms such as municipal landfills, wastewater treatment and disposal systems, underground repositories for hazardous waste and so on. Soil also performs vital ecological functions in relation to plant life and groundwater integrity. This ongoing project develops, and experimentally validates, new conceptual frameworks and mathematical models for simulating the migration of pollutants in fractured soils and their effects on groundwater quality. The multiple-porosity framework allows the simulation of multi-pathway contamination, including fractured soils and soils undergoing multiple sources of non-equilibrium partitioning. A number of formulations are developed leading to boundary element and finite element computer algorithms in 2D and 3D. The project therefore improve scientific ability to determine whether and how soils can be used for waste insulation.
Project Publications:
Abbas El-Zein. 2002. A multiple-porosity model of contaminant transport in fractured soils. Eight International Symposium on Numerical Models in Geomechanics, NUMOG VIII, 10-12 April 2002, Rome.
Abbas El-Zein. 2003. Contaminant transport in fissured soils by three-dimensional boundary elements. International Journal of Geomechanics ASCE, 3(1-2):75-83.
Abbas El-Zein. 2003. A multiple-porosity model for the transport of reactive contaminants in fractured unsaturated soils with non-equilibrium partitioning. International Journal of Geomechanics ASCE, 3(3-4):182-190.
Abbas El-Zein and John Carter. 2003. A multiple-porosity finite element model for reactive contaminants in soils. Second MIT conference on Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics, June 2003, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Abbas El-Zein, John P. Carter, David W. Airey. 2004. A three-dimensional finite-element method of contaminant transport in soils. Ninth ANZ Conference on Geomechanics, Auckland, February 2004.
