Accidents which result in the contact of hazardous chemical substances with the environment are frequent. Typical examples are solvents accidental spills and inadequate waste disposal. Therefore, it would be interesting to predict the distribution of the substance throughout the soil as a function of contact time, in order to foresee the environmental impact and help in the application of remediation techniques. It has been developed a computational code to simulate the dispersion of pollutants in soils, by solving a mathematical model based on the mass conservation and on the transport rate of pollutants in porous media. Numerical results were compared with experimental data, showing a good agreement.
Pollutant transport in porous media; soil contamination; numeric simulation; environmental engineering