Investigation of Virus Transport in the Saturated Porous Media by Hydrous-1D Model

Groundwater may become contaminated with pathogenic microorganisms from artificial recharge with wastewater or surface water, or from septic tanks or leaking sewage pipes. Therefore, to protect groundwater from contamination, adequate setback distances between these sources of contamination and production wells for drinking water are needed. Surface water is also a source of drinking water production. Surface water may be contaminated with pathogenic microorganisms, mainly due to discharges of wastewater and by manure run-off from agricultural land.To produce safe drinking water from surface water these pathogens must be removed.One effective way is the passage of surface water, through soil, as is the case in bank filtration, dune recharge and deep well injection. To assure production of safe drinking water, adequate travel times and travel distances are needed. The only way to evaluate the effectiveness of soil passage is to calculate virus concentration removal by means of a computational model. Computational models are useful for the modeling of microorganism transport such as bacteria and virus, for application and identification of processes. This model can be applied for the determination of cesspool locations, water wells, septic tank locations and disposal locations of sludge in agricultural lands. Disposal of wastewater in cesspool is the main method of disposal wastewater in Iran. The annual volume of domestic wastewater in Iran was estimated to be about. In this paper, virus removal by soil passage from cesspools to groundwater and transports in groundwater were evaluated as a function of travel time and travel distance by means of a numerical model for permeable soils (sand, loamy sand and sandy loam) in a sample aquifer. Input parameters of the model are provided from previous studies. The results show that a travel distances of 29,18 and 6m is adequate to inactivate pathogenic microorganisms in the sandy, sandy-loam and loamy-sand soils, respectively. The selected model is HYDRUS-1D (software for simulating water, heat and solute movement in one-dimensional variably saturated media).