Over the years, crude oil spills have occurred frequently, resulting in large amounts of toxic organic contaminants seeping down into the onshore soil-groundwater system. These non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) can easily attach to soil particle surfaces and are difficult to eliminate, harming the environment continuously. Besides, the heterogeneity of soil makes the distribution of NAPL...
Graphene oxide nanoparticles (GONPs) proved effective in the adsorption of a broad set of environmentally relevant contaminants, such as organic aromatic compounds, heavy metals, dye molecules, pharmaceuticals (Iqbal and Abdala, 2013; Zhou et al., 2016). Moreover, thanks to their small size, GONPs could be injected in the subsurface for the in-situ treatment of contaminated aquifer systems. A...
Soil contamination is one of the challenging problems that present risks for both the environment and the general population. Manufactured products made by chemical plants commonly contaminate aquifers and soils with miscible and immiscible organic liquids. In particular, in-situ remediation of soil contaminated with Dense Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids (DNAPLs) is of great interest. They represent...
The remediation of sites contaminated with Dense Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids (DNAPL) has gained great prominence due to the extreme difficulty of their remediation (Colombano et al., 2021). These DNAPLs, subjected to gravity forces, penetrate downwards through the aquifer and form a discontinuous insoluble trapping phase below the groundwater level. On the one hand, owing to their high density,...
The ensemble smoother with multiple data assimilation is used to reconstruct the release of a contaminant into a sandbox using concentration observations downgradient from the release point. The algorithm is tested first with some synthetic experiments mimicking the sandbox and then applied to two experiments with different release functions. The frequency of the sampling, the density of the...
In recent decades, the problem of soil pollution by crude oil and other petroleum-derived fuels, has faced growing attention due to the quick urbanization and industrialization. Unfortunately, petroleum hydrocarbons-contaminated soil is causing significant environmental problems due to the persistence of pollutants and their carcinogenic and mutagenic compounds, which accumulate in soil,...
Study of the mobility of nanoparticles in sand columns (or core flooding) at laboratory scale provides a good basis for understanding processes important in environmental engineering and hydrocarbon recovery from subsurface resources. Both of these applications can involve multi-phase fluid flow in subsurface porous systems. In hydrology, column experiments are used, among others, to support...
The research has been stimulated by the emblematic case of the Mar Piccolo, in the city of Taranto (South of Italy). It is a heavily polluted marine basin but, at the same time, it hosts unique natural ecosystem and several protected species. The need of tuning customized and efficient remediation strategies stirred a cutting-edge multidisciplinary investigation campaign and an advanced...
