Overview

EnvSE 408
Contaminant Hydrology

Derek Elsworth
Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering

Overview

What is GeoEE 408?

This course is a senior-year elective for Environmental Systems Engineering students. It focuses on the skills needed for those who will work in the area of contaminant hydrology. Former alumni have gone on to work for consulting engineers and hydrogeologists, for regulatory agencies, and for corporations involved in environmental control and environmental audits. Prior participants have been undergraduate and graduate students from Agronomy, ERM, Earth Sciences, Geosciences, and Geo-Environmental Engineering.

What are the Pre-requisites?

This course builds on the background supplied by an introductory course on hydrogeology. At Penn State, this is typically GeoSc 452, an Introduction to Hydrogeology.We build quickly on this base, to understand the mechanisms that control the rate of transport in both the saturated groundwater zone, and in the vadose zone.

What will you do?

We work sequentially through the material included in the syllabus.

We emphasize the basic concepts of flow, transport, retardation, and attenuation of a variety of contaminants in groundwater. Specifically, we consider immiscible industrial chemicals, both in free-phase and dissolved, but the relevance is to a broad range of contaminants.

The important concepts are introduced through simple "back-of-the-envelope" calculations, and a sequence of assignments emphasize this approach.

What skills will you leave with?

This course will give you the skills you need to be useful to an employer, as soon as you walk out of our door, and into their's. A valuable adjunct to this course would be HAZWOPER training, also available on campus.

Derek Elsworth