0000000000003946
AUTHOR
Rosa Aiello
Evaluation of clogging in full-scale subsurface flow constructed wetlands
Abstract Treatment processes that occur in constructed wetlands can result in gradual clogging of the porous medium. Clogging may result in hydraulic malfunction and/or reduced treatment performance. The aim of this study was to analyze the hydraulic aspects of horizontal subsurface flow (H-SSF) constructed wetlands (CWs), and, in particular, to investigate the clogging phenomena through in situ measurements of hydraulic conductivity of the gravel bed, quantification of accumulated clog matter and flow paths visualization by means of tracer tests. Removal efficiencies of chemical and physical contaminants were also assessed. Experiments were carried out in three full-scale H-SSF CWs in Sici…
Artificial Neural Networks for Predicting the Water Retention Curve of Sicilian Agricultural Soils
Modeling soil-water regime and solute transport in the vadose zone is strategic for estimating agricultural productivity and optimizing irrigation water management. Direct measurements of soil hydraulic properties, i.e., the water retention curve and the hydraulic conductivity function, are often expensive and time-consuming, and represent a major obstacle to the application of simulation models. As a result, there is a great interest in developing pedotransfer functions (PTFs) that predict the soil hydraulic properties from more easily measured and/or routinely surveyed soil data, such as particle size distribution, bulk density (&rho
An assessment of the Beerkan method for determining the hydraulic properties of a sandy loam soil
Abstract Establishing the ability of the Beerkan Estimation of Soil Transfer parameters (BEST) procedure to reproduce soil properties is necessary for specific soil types. In this investigation, the BEST predictions for a sandy loam soil were compared with water retention data obtained by a standard laboratory method and with the saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, K s , obtained by both the Wu et al. (1999) method, applied to the BEST infiltration data, and the Simplified Falling Head (SFH) technique. When the original BEST-slope algorithm with the infiltration constants fixed at β = 1.9 and γ = 0.79 was applied, the agreement between the predicted and the measured retention data was sa…
Assessment of clogging in constructed wetlands by saturated hydraulic conductivity measurements
Abstract This study aims at defining a methodology to evaluate Ks reductions of gravel material constituting constructed wetland (CW) bed matrices. Several schemes and equations for the Lefranc's test were compared by using different gravel sizes and at multiple spatial scales. The falling-head test method was implemented by using two steel permeameters: one impervious (IMP) and one pervious (P) on one side. At laboratory scale, mean K values for a small size gravel (8–15 × 10−2 m) measured by the IMP and the P permeameters were equal to 19,466 m/d and 30,662 m/d, respectively. Mean Ks values for a big size gravel (10–25 × 10−2 m) measured by the IMP and the P permeameters were equal to 12,…