Course Number: 12-725

Primary Audience: M.S. and Ph.D. students in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Chemical Engineering.

Secondary Audience: Graduate students in other Engineering Disciplines, advanced undergraduates in Chemical or Civil and Environmental Engineering upon approval of the instructor.

Course Objectives

• To understand the factors governing the behavior of hazardous organic chemicals in the environment: distribution among air, water, and soil; surface water transport and subsurface transport; transformations.
• To understand how a chemical’s properties and equilibrium and rate principles affect the distribution of pollutants in the environment.
• Become familiar with chemical property estimation methods.
• To derive and use equilibrium and kinetic models for determining the ultimate fate of organic pollutants in the environment. 

 

 

Prerequisites:  12-655 Water Quality Engineering or equivalent, or by consent of instructor
Grading:  30% Homework, 30% Midterm, 40% Final Exam

Major Topics
(Note:  Not all topics are addressed each semester)

• Physical and Chemical Properties of Organic Pollutants
• Equilibrium Partitioning and Equilibrium Partitioning Models
  • Air-Water partitioning-hydrophobicity, solubility, Henry’s Constant
  • Water-Solid and Biota-Water Partitioning-K_ow, BCF
• Interphase Mass Transfer
  • Gas-liquid mass transfer
  • Controlling resistance
• Contaminant Reactions and Oxygen Demand
  • Contaminant degradability and persistance
  • First-order decay processes
  • Biological transformations
• Reactor Theory
  • CSTR vs. PFR
  • Response to steady and pulse inputs
• BOD Loading and Oxygen DemandChemical Fate in Municipal Waste Treatment
  • Degradable waste in streams
  • Streeter-Phelps and oxygen sag
  • Contaminant removal processes; sorption, volatilization, biodegradation
• Mixing and Dispersion
  • Transport equation
  • Problem solving for step and pulse inputs
• Groundwater Flow and Subsurface Contaminant Transport
  • Darcy’s Law
  • Permeability and hydraulic conductivity
  • 1-D transport with sorbing contaminants
  • Retardation and effects of clean-up strategies