Abstract

Environmental pollution problems are crucial concerns that have attracted a great deal of public attention. More actions are urgently required on formulating remediation strategy for contaminated sites and setting effective standard and regulations for reducing the toxic pollutants in the environment. To achieve these needs, comprehensive understanding of and characterizing the natural behaviour of chemical in the environment are essential tasks for environmental risk assessment and management. In this study, a new user-friendly fuzzy-set enhanced environmental multimedia modelling system (EMMS) is developed, which includes four key modules: an air dispersion module, a polluting source module, an unsaturated zone module, and a groundwater module. Many improvements over previous environmental multimedia models have been achieved, through dynamically quantifying the intermedia mass flux; incorporating fuzzy-set approach into EMMS; and designing a user-friendly graphic user interface (GUI). The developed EMMS can be a useful tool in (1) estimating the time-varying and spatial-varying chemical concentrations in air, soil, and groundwater; (2) characterizing the potential risk to human health presented by contaminants released from a contaminated site; and (3) quantifying the uncertainties associated with modelling systems and subsequently providing robustness and flexibility for the remediation-related decision making. The developed EMMS has been tested and validated through a set of case studies including both pilot-scale and field-scale validations. Reasonable results have been obtained. It indicates that, with the aid of fuzzy-set approach, EMMS can be a reliable and powerful tool to address the complex environmental multimedia pollution problems and provide an extensive support for decision makers in managing the contaminated environmental systems