Investigation of physicochemical parameters in drinking water resources and health risk assessment: a case study in NW Iran

In this study, the amount of cyanide in gold mine tailings is modeled as conceptual, statistical, and mathematical to determine environmental risk level and also to estimate the fate and transport of cyanide in tailings. Therefore, 116 points were selected for sampling from three levels of gold mine tailings and analyzed by colorimetric method. As a matter of fact, new hybrid modeling methods such as AdaBoost, Support Vector Machine, Linear Discriminant Analysis, and Random Forest were used in estimation. In current study, The AdaBoost method was qualified as the best one by minimum estimation error (less than 10%). The model derived from the AdaBoost method shows an average variation of 581 g/day in the volume of cyanide tailings. Thus, the important results of this paper are the presentation of 3D numerical and especially conceptual models according to the 3D cyanide variation in the sulfide gold mine tailings and governing physic/chemical parameters. These qualitative and quantitative results can be used for the management of tailings dam and prevention of the contaminant extension.     

Experimental study and numerical simulation of soil water and salt transport under dry drainage conditions

Coal mining has serious impacts on local environment, including damage to the land and soil by subsidence, damage to ground-water systems through the fracturing and subsiding of overlying rocks, contamination of surface waters with acid mine drainage, and pollution of the atmosphere by release of toxic gases. The damage to ground water and its consequent impacts on the regional environment is the core of research of the coal mining from the perspective of environment protection. The present paper focuses on the changes of surface vegetation coverage, the pollutants released from pit coal power plants, and the damages to the ground aquifers induced by mining activities in arid Eastern Junggar coalfield of China. At first, the authors investigated the changes of surface vegetation coverage, since mining began in the 2000s using Landsat data. Results show that the low surface vegetation coverage (grade 1 plus grade 2) in the southern part of the region decreased from 11.62?×?10⁸ m² in 2003 to 9.57?×?10⁸ m² in 2017 (?17.6%), while it increased from 11.58?×?10⁸ m² in 2003 to 12.70?×?10⁸ m² in 2017 (+?9.7%) in the eastern part. The high surface vegetation coverage (grade 3 plus grade 4) in the southern part increased from 1.94?×?10⁸ m² in 2003 to 4.00?×?10⁸ m² in 2017 (+?106.2%), while it decreased from 4.39?×?10⁸ m² in 2003 to 3.26?×?10⁸ m² in 2017 (?25.74%) in the eastern part. The data of annual precipitation during the same period in this area show that the changes of surface vegetation coverage have less relationship with the annual precipitation, which indicates that the mining activities is probably the major factor for that. Second, a statistic of air pollutants generated from pit coal power plants was made based on data of references. Results show that the estimated gaseous pollutant emissions increased as 865.23 tons of smoke particles, 5940.73 tons of SO₂, and 7584.48 tons of NO₂ in 2013, which increased rapidly with 9.73 times the smoke particle, 21.69 times the SO₂, and 9.24 times the NO₂ than that of 2007. And then, the physical and numerical simulation of the damage of mining activities to aquifers was made to show the permeability of the reference points of overlying aquifers varies associated with mining activities. Results show that the porous rock matrix permeability has a negative relationship with fluctuation during mining, while the fracture permeability shows a positive one. Finally, a case investigation in southern area surrounding this coalfield was illustrated. Result shows that the local ground-water level decreased by 16 m difference from the altitude level of?+?774 m in 2003 to?+?758 m in 2013. Data and results from this study presented the already and the potential pollutions and damages to local environment induced by the mining activities in this region.

     

Seismic hazard analysis and local site effect of the 2017 Mw 7.3 Sarpol-e Zahab,Iran, earthquake

Natural Hazards - A strong earthquake occurred on November 12, 2017, in Sarpol-e Zahab city, western Iran, with the moment magnitude ( $$M_{{\text{w}}}$$ ) of 7.3 and a focal depth of...     

Analyzing the occurrence of floods and droughts in connection with climate change in Punjab province,Pakistan

Natural Hazards - Frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are immensely changing throughout the world. This study aims to give insight into the changing climatic patterns leading to...     

Zoning map for drought prediction using integrated machine learning models with a nomadic people optimization algorithm

Natural Hazards - The modelling of drought is of utmost importance for the efficient management of water resources. This article used the adaptive neuro-fuzzy interface system (ANFIS), multilayer...     

Monthly precipitation assessments in association with atmospheric circulation indices by using tree-based models

Natural Hazards - The Urmia Lake basin is one of the most important basins in Iran, facing many problems due to poor water management and rainfall reduction. Under current circumstances, it becomes...     

Bedload resistance in supercritical flow

The movement of bedload in subcritical flow produces additional roughness as compared to flow in a rigid bed. The magnitude of this bed load roughness is proportional to the thickness of the sediment layer moving along the bed, the particle size and the sediment concentration. In a supercritical flow, however, further resistance is expected due to the momentum absorption by the high flow velocity. In this study the effect of sediment movement on the flow resistance in supercritical flow was experimentally investigated. The experiments included flows over smooth and rough beds carrying sediment of mean diameters D50=2.80, 5.42 and 7.06 mm in a rigid rectangular channel. The results show that the sediment transport may increase the friction factor by up to 90% and 60% in smooth and rough beds, respectively. Bedload extracts its momentum from the flow, which causes a reduction of near bed flow velocity and steeper velocity gradient near the bed resulting in an increase in shear velocity as well as in roughness height. The increase in friction factor is directly related to bedload concentration and particle size.     

A model of inter-annual variability in beach levels

Beach profile data, collected twice per year at 19 stations over a 25 km length of coastline in Tremadoc Bay, have been analysed to quantify the inter-annual variability in beach levels over a 7 year period and the results compared against the output of a numerical model. Using hourly wind data as forcing, the morphological development of northern Tremadoc Bay was simulated by wave, tidal, longshore transport, total transport and bed level change models. The modelling methodology was efficient and innovative, allowing realistic simulations of long duration with a time step of 1 h, hence capturing the high frequency nature of wind events. The model was run for each of the 7 autumn/winter periods (generally November–April) and the modelled net change in beach levels compared with the data from all 19 stations. The model results had reasonable agreement with the beach profile surveys. However, the observed magnitude of bed level change in the bay lagged the model output by 1 year, indicating that sediment processes acting over a larger area are important in a relatively localised study of inter-annual variability.     

Effects of wettability and pore-level displacement on hydrocarbon trapping

We use a three-dimensional mixed-wet random network model representing Berea sandstone to extend our previous work on relative permeability hysteresis during water-alternating-gas (WAG) injection cycles [Suicmez, VS, Piri, M, Blunt, MJ, 2007, Pore-scale simulation of water alternate gas injection, Transport Porous Med 66(3), 259–86]. We compute the trapped hydrocarbon saturation for tertiary water-flooding, which is water injection into different initial gas saturations, S_gi, established by secondary gas injection after primary drainage. Tertiary water-flooding is continued until all the gas and oil is trapped. We study four different wettability conditions: water-wet, weakly water-wet, weakly oil-wet and oil-wet. We demonstrate that the amounts of oil and gas that are trapped show surprising trends with wettability that cannot be captured using previously developed empirical trapping models. We show that the amount of oil that is trapped by water in the presence of gas increases as the medium becomes more oil-wet, which is opposite from that seen for two-phase flow. It is only through a careful analysis of displacement statistics and fluid configurations that these results can be explained. This illustrates the need to have detailed models of the displacement processes that represent the three-phase displacement physics as carefully as possible. Further work is needed to explore the full range of behavior as a function of wettability and displacement path.