Modeling Strontium transport in soil column and groundwater contamination prediction

Soil contamination due to natural and anthropogenic pollutants is a global problem.Soil pollution produces physical, chemical and biological imbalances affecting living beings.Radioactive contaminants receive special attention due to their radiotoxicity and decay time. The decay of a radioactive element is a physical constant which is generally defined as the half life, which is the time it takes for the mass fraction of a given radionuclide to be reduced by a half.. In this paper strontium was selected as a reactive contaminant. One dimensional solute transport is used for simulation of radionuclide transport. Computational programs were written with Crank-Nicolson scheme using MATLAB software. Experimental results are used for the calibration of the model. The proposed numerical model shows good agreement with experimental results. Finally Numerical model used for prediction of radionuclide concentration versus depth and time.