TITLE:
Numerical Study of Heat Transfer and Contaminant Transport in an Unsaturated Porous Soil
AUTHORS:
Abdelhamid Belghit, Mustapha Benyaich
KEYWORDS:
Soil, Heat and Mass Transfer, Porous Media, Contaminant
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Water Resource and Protection,
Vol.6 No.13,
September
29,
2014
ABSTRACT: Penetration
of chemicals in the soil ground through irrigation water or rainfall induces
important risks for the environment. These risks are badly known and may lead
to direct contamination of the environment (atmosphere or ground water) or
harmful effects on organisms living at ground level, indirectly affecting men.
It is thus necessary to estimate these potential chemical risks on the
environment. For that reason, the gradual change of these products
(fertilizers, solutions, pollutants, ...) in the ground has been the subject of
a lot of recent research works, based in particular on the study of
non-saturated porous media in a theoretical, numerical or experimental way.
Most of these works are incomplete and, in order to simplify the problem, they don’t
take into accounts some process, which may be of prime importance under
particular natural conditions. Complexity of such studies results from their
multidisciplinary nature. In this communication, we study simultaneous
transport of pollutant, the water that provides transport and the heat transfer
in a 200 cm long cylindrical column full of sand taken as a non-saturated
porous medium. We consider two kinds of conditions on the temperature at the
column surface: the case of constant temperature and the case of sinusoidal
temperature. We evaluate the influence of this temperature on the transfers. This
study is purely numerical. We use the control volume method to determine
hydrous, thermal and pollutant concentration profiles.