MODELING THE FATE AND TRANSPORT OF HYDROPHOBIC ORGANIC COMPOUNDS IN AN UNSTEADY RIVER-ESTUARINE SYSTEM

1 INTRODUCTION Extensive literature (Brown et al., 1985; Sawhney et al., 1981; Bierman and Swain, 1982; Connolly, 1980; Lopez-Avila and Hites, 1980; O扖onnor, 1988) described lots of sorbed pollutants or toxic substances in bed sediments of rivers, even after the effluent was halted for a long time. This is particularly true for hydrophobic organic compounds that can be sorbed on the particles and accumulated in the river bed sediments (Karickhoff et al., 1979). Pollution events of…

MODELING THE FATE AND TRANSPORT OF HYDROPHOBIC ORGANIC COMPOUNDS IN AN UNSTEADY RIVER-ESTUARINE SYSTEM

This research develops a generalized, one-dimensional, finite difference model for simulating the distribution of toxic substances in a river-estuarine system. The three sub-models for unsteady flow, sediment transport, and the reaction of toxic substances are also presented using an uncoupled numerical method. The paper also includes experimental work for sorption/desorption, field measurements of organic carbon content in the heavily polluted Keelung River, and a laboratory study of cohesive sediment transport for the model calibration and verification. In addition, this study simulates the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the Keelung River in northern Taiwan as a case study. Encouraging results are obtained, and suggest that the modeling approach could be extended to simulate the fate and transport of sorbed pollutants in tidal river.