soil and pollutants

[dabpigpen]

I did an experiment to study the flow of different liquid pollutants thru 3 different types of soil. I have my data,but the reasearch has been hard to find at an 8th grade level. Can you suggest where I can find information on this topic, and generally regarding viscosity of polllutants and soil as a filter to control the flow of pollutants?

[deleted-71447]

Hi dabpigpen,
Welcome to the Ask an Expert forums. Congrats on finishing your data collection. It sounds like you've done a very interesting and challenging experiment, and it is one that is closely related to my own research. For information about flow through soils, try some internet searches for "soil permeability viscosity" and other combinations of those terms. Here is one page that mighthelp:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_permeability
Take a look at the first equation, but don't worry about understanding it all. For starters, ignore everything except q (flow) and μ (viscosity). If all the other terms in that equation stay the same, and the viscosity (μ) doubles, what happens to the quantity of flow (q)?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "soil as a filter to control the flow of pollutants". If you explain more about your hypothesis and experimental procedure, I'll do my best to help.

Looking forward to hearing more,
Chris

[deleted-71417]

Hi,

Understanding how pollutants move through soil is a complicated but very important subject that can affect thousands of people’s everyday lives. What people wish would happen, but rarely does, is that the pollutant reacts chemically with the soil and becomes permanently immobilized, or that organisms living in the soil eat the pollutant and destroy it. What more frequently happens is that the pollutants clings to the soil, but not too tightly, so that water moving through the soil slowly carries the pollutant along with it. This process is very much like chromatography,

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... A&from=TSW

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/chem-eng/Biotec ... _types.htm

You may also find the Background sections of these experiments(scroll down quite a way) helpful:
http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:ht ... VITY11.rtf

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:Xx ... clnk&gl=us

You might also be interested in this explanation:

http://www.berkeleycitizen.org/environ/lust1.html

The result is that the pollutant moves in the direction of water flow, but more slowly than the water. Here are some other materials(unfortunately probably somewhat above an eighth grade science level) that describes how they tried to model how pollutants leach from a real dump:

http://www.geoeng.ca/Directory/kerry%20 ... hanics.pdf

http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRec ... =ADA191856

http://geo.web.ru/conf/khitariada/1-200 ... col-5e.pdf

http://www.lpilibya.org/web/files/Chara ... ced%20.pdf

This issue is terribly important to a lot of people. One example from all to real life: I grew up in Richland, WA, next to the Hanford Atomic Energy Reservation. During World War 2 they reprocessed nuclear fuel here to make plutonium for atomic bombs. The wastes from reprocessing were stored in steel tanks. Over time these tanks have started to leak dangerously radioactive salts into the desert ground, and those salts have slowly begun to migrate toward the nearby Columbia River. If that pollution reaches the Columbia River radioactivity could enter the river water and be carried downriver, where it could potentially enter the drinking water of millions of people living downriver. This has really freaked a lot of people out.

Good luck with your project!

Barrett Tomlinson