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DEVELOPMENT OF A DATA EVALUATION/DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR REMEDIATION OF SUBSURFACE CONTAMINATION
Citation:
Eisenberg, F. AND D. B. McLaughlin. DEVELOPMENT OF A DATA EVALUATION/DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR REMEDIATION OF SUBSURFACE CONTAMINATION. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/R-01/044 (NTIS PB2002-101966), 2001.
Impact/Purpose:
information
Description:
Subsurface contamination frequently originates from spatially distributed sources of multi-component nonaqueous phase liquids (NAPLs). Such chemicals are typically persistent sources of ground-water contamination that are difficult to characterize. This work addresses the feasibility of using dissolved concentration measurements to estimate the spatial distribution of each component of an immobile (or residual) NAPL mixture in a saturated field-scale system.
In order to investigate the possibility of using this approach at a field site, we applied the estimation to simulated problems. The first of these is a simple one-dimensional point source with three NAPL components. One advantage of this problem is that it is computationally cheap enough to enable repeated runs. Thus it lends itself to Monte Carlo analysis of varying measurement strategies. The second problem is a two-dimensional spatially distributed source. This problem requires a significantly different formulation from the one-dimensional analysis. This report contains the results of the one-dimensional analysis as well as our development of the two-dimensional state and estimation equations that are being used in ongoing research. Results from the two-dimensional analysis could be easily extended to a general three-dimensional problem and the application of the algorithm to field data.