Contaminant Transport Model for Unsaturated Soil Using Fuzzy Approach
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 132, Issue 11
Abstract
Contaminant transport in the unsaturated zone is important for managing water resources and assessing the damage due to contamination in the field of irrigation, water management, wastewater management, and urban and agricultural drainage systems. Deterministic modeling which is widely used for contaminant transport is not adequate because it considers model input parameters as well-defined crisp values and hence does not account for uncertainties and imprecision. This paper presents a contaminant transport model based on fuzzy set theory to simulate water flow and contaminant transport in the unsaturated soil zone under surface ponding condition. Among all soil hydraulic parameters that have uncertainty associated with them, saturated hydraulic conductivity was found to be the most sensitive to model outputs. Trapezoidal fuzzy numbers were used to express the uncertainties associated with saturated hydraulic conductivity. The incorporation of uncertainties into contaminant transport model is useful in decision making, as it yields scientifically and practically based estimates of contaminant concentration.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 132 • Issue 11 • November 2006
Pages: 1489 - 1497
Copyright
© 2006 ASCE.
History
Received: Aug 17, 2004
Accepted: Oct 25, 2005
Published online: Nov 1, 2006
Published in print: Nov 2006
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