INSIDE-T: A Groundwater Contamination Transport Model for Sustainability Assessment in Remediation Practice

Abstract

Current sustainability assessment (SA) tools to help deal with contaminated groundwater sites are inherently subjective and hardly applied. One reason may be lack of proper tools for addressing contaminant spread which are basically objective. To fill this gap, there is a need for contaminant transport models that provide site managers with needed room for applying their judgments and considerations about the efficiency of each remediation method based on their experiences in similar cases. INSIDE-T uses trend analysis and inverse modeling to estimate transport parameters. It then simulates contaminant transport both with and without the inclusion of remedial actions in a transparent way. The sustainability of each remedy measure can then be quantified based on the underlying SA tool (INSIDE). INSIDE-T was applied to a site in south Sweden, contaminated with pentachlorophenol. Simulation scenarios were developed to enable comparison between various remediation strategies and combinations of these. The application indicated that natural attenuation was not a viable option within the timeframe of interest. Although pump-and-treat combined with a permeable reactive barrier was found to be just as effective as bioremediation after five years, it received a much lower sustainability score overall. INSIDE-T outcomes enable site managers to test and evaluate different scenarios, a necessity in participatory decision-making practices such as remediation projects.

Unraveling the Fate and Transport of DNAPLs in Heterogeneous Aquifer Systems—A Critical Review and Bibliometric Analysis

“…Details of the several source mass release models and critical findings observed from these studies are presented in Table S7. Analytical studies implement integral, differential, and combinations of transformation techniques to solve contaminant transport equations, which eventually represent various physical and biogeochemical processes in porous systems [81,82]. For example, mass transfer processes between mobile and immobile water, residual NAPL and water, and aquifer solid and water were considered in the formulation of the simple analytical model [9].…”