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-Kow, 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