Institute for Groundwater Studies (IGS)

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Browsing Institute for Groundwater Studies (IGS) by Author "Botha, Joseph François"

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    A generic assessment of waste disposal at Douala City practice, prinicipals and uncertainties
    (University of the Free State, 2013-01) Atangana, Abdon; Botha, Joseph François
    English: One reason why groundwater, so often constitutes the main source of drinking water in many cities and towns around the world, is because it is frequently present in sufficient quantities at the point of demand. However, this seemingly advantage may sometimes be its greatest disadvantage, especially in situations where the groundwater occurs at shallow depths and the area overlying the aquifer is populated densely. This problem is particularly relevant in the present technological age with its vast quantities of waste that is often disposed in an uncontrolled manner. Such a situation occurs at Douala the economic capital of Cameroon in central Africa. The city not only host more than 80% of industries in the country, but also has the largest urban population of approximately 3 000 000 with a population density of approximately 350 persons per square kilometre, which continue to increase at a rate of approximately 120 000 migrants per year from the rural areas, while the groundwater level is very shallow and may sometimes rise above the soil surface, especially during floods, which occur not too infrequently. Although the pollution problem is not restricted to groundwater as such, it is aggravated here, because of the ancient belief that wastes are safely disposed of, if buried below the earth’s surface. It took disasters like Love Canal and the Price Landfill to discover the detrimental effects that this practice may have on the population living on or near polluted aquifers. Extreme care therefore should be exercised to prevent the pollution of any aquifer that may pose problems to living organisms or to try and restore a polluted aquifer threatening the natural environment. Groundwater pollution should therefore receive urgent attention when discovered. This thesis describes an attempt to develop a set of guidelines for the restoration of the groundwater resources at Douala, based on the relatively new technique of permeable reactive barriers for groundwater remediation—a technique that is also increasingly applied in the restoration of the Superfund sites in the United States of America. Modern attempts to clean up contaminated aquifers, relies heavily on the use of suitable computational numerical models. Such models have in the past always been based on the classical hydrodynamic dispersion equation. However, an analysis of the equation in this thesis has shown that the equation cannot account for the long‐tail contamination plumes characteristic of fractured rock aquifers. Fortunately, it is not too difficult to develop a more suitable equation. For, as shown in the thesis, all that one has to do is to replace the ordinary derivatives in the classical equation with fractional derivatives. Mechanistic modeling of physical systems is often complicated by the presence of uncertainties, which was in the past usually neglected in the models used in the restoration of aquifers.While these uncertainties have regularly been neglected in the past, it is nowadays imperative that any groundwater model be accompanied by estimates of uncertainties associated with the model. Although a large number of approaches are available for this purpose, they often require exorbitant computing resources. The present investigation was consequently limited to the application of the Latin Hypercube Sampling method applied to an analytical solution of the hydrodynamic dispersion equation. It has been known for years that the hydrodynamic dispersion equation discussed in Chapter 5, is not able to account for the long‐tail plumes often observed in studies of contaminated fractured‐rock aquifers. An approach frequently used to account for this is to replace the ordinary spatial and temporal derivatives in the hydrodynamic equation with fractional derivatives—a procedure confirmed in this thesis.