Sharif Digital Repository

Soil and water pollution is one of the most common types of pollution in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The development of mines and the oil and petrochemical industry on one hand and the non-compliance with environmental requirements on the other hand have caused large amounts of hydrocarbon pollutants and heavy metals to enter the environment in recent decades. Petroleum materials and heavy metals leak into the surrounding environment during drilling and extraction in oil sites and mines or during land and sea transportation, despite the measures taken to control their pollution. The conducted studies show that human industrial activities are the only cause of environmental pollution... 

Laboratory studies to investigate the effects of different saline concentrations (such as sodium chloride or calcium chloride) on the soil water retention behavior of clayey soils and their volumetric changes have received much attention recently. However, many previous studies have investigated these effects in only one path of the SWRC (wetting or drying path) and the effects of saline concentration on hydraulic hysteresis have not been considered. In addition, researchers have frequently studied these effects on SWRC on clay samples, and little research has been done on collapsible soils. Therefore, the most important purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of increasing... 

The instability and contamination leakage through tailings dams is one of the major problems of them. These dams are usually constructed through self-consolidation with minimum compaction effort, so special attention must be given to the stability of these structures. In addition, tailings dams contain considerable amounts of metals and chemically soluble contaminants resulting from mining processes in their reservoirs, making them more likely to leak contamination from the dam's foundation and body, causing pollution downstream. The infiltration of various chemical contaminants into the soil may alter its hydraulic and resistance properties. Laboratory studies have shown that pore solution... 

Various contaminants and their leachate, when they penetrate into the soil, cause changes in soil microstructure, this change in microstructure leads to changes in soil permeability and volume. In this study, first, the effects of soil microstructure change on the hydraulic conductivity of saturated soil were investigated using the change in initial saturation degree during compaction for compacted samples and the change in sample construction in reconstituted samples. Also, the simultaneous effect of changing the initial microstructure and salt solution on the hydraulic conductivity of saturated silty clay soils using a three-axial permeability device with the ability to measure volume... 

Understanding many issues related to environmental geotechnics and soil sciences such as: instability and collapse of soil slopes, sinkholes, leakage from landfills and isolation of nuclear landfills, and optimization Agricultural processing depends on our knowledge of the behavior of unsaturated soils and their volume changes. To better understand the behavior of unsaturated soils, it is important to study the soil-water retention curve (SWRC) and the factors affecting it. These include factors such as porosity, grain size distribution, soil minerals, pore size distribution, and pore water chemistry, which affect soil-water retention curves and volume changes. Since the simultaneous effect... 

Vegetation can be used as a research solution at the cutting edge of knowledge, cost-effective, aesthetic, pleasing, and environmentally friendly in natural hazards. Understanding the hydraulic properties, including the permeability of vegetated soils, is very important for various environmental applications. Different and sometimes conflicting behaviors have been observed in literature. There has been no general consensus in the literature regarding permeability due to the influence of several factors. In addition, there are many uncertainties about the effect of plant cultivation and root system effects on anisotropic soil permeability. It is essential to address this issue because of the... 

Debris flows are mass flows of soil, rock and water that typically occur on steep slopes in mountainous regions due to intense rainfall. These flows travel long distances and, due to their significant volume and speed, cause significant causalities downstream. In order to dissipate the energy of debris flows, slit barriers are installed along the flow path to prevent rocks and coarse particles from moving further downhill, thereby reducing the speed and destructive power of the debris flow. Given that the interaction between debris flows and barriers plays a crucial role in energy dissipation, and the geometry of slit barriers is one of the most important factors influencing the interaction... 

The increase in the amount of groundwater exploitation and climate changes has made land subsidence into one of the environmental problems and has caused many problems in various infrastructures such as urban areas, residential buildings, and vital arteries such as power transmission lines. Many areas of the country, especially areas with smooth topography such as plains where alluvium accumulates, due to excessive exploitation of groundwater resources and climate changes, are facing a decrease in the level of groundwater, an increase in the thickness of the unsaturated layer, and as a result, progressive subsidence. In particular, the destructive effects of land subsidence on power... 

Due to humanity's increasing demands, the provision of raw materials plays a crucial role in meeting these needs, with a significant portion of the required materials being obtained from mines. One method for increasing the efficiency of mine wastes is heap leaching. A leaching heap is a layered mound of low-grade ore particles piled on an impermeable layer called a leaching pad. After being sprayed on the heap and reacting with the ores, the leaching solution is drained through the drainage system located in the heap leach pad and transferred to the collection pond for recovery of the target minerals. Due to the flow of fluid within the heap and the degradation of particles due to leaching,... 

The measurement of saturated hydraulic conductivity in conventional methods is based on the assumption of non-deformable porous media. However, this assumption is violated in most cases, especially when dealing with highly deformable soils such as collapsible and expansive soils. An alternative is to use flexible wall triaxial devices, yet the deformation characteristics during wetting and sample saturation are missed. This issue is of great importance in soils with considerable amount of volume changes (e.g., problematic soils). It should be noted that errors included in measuring sample volume changes, water inflow/outflow rates, and the creation of sidewall leakage are essential factors... 

Given that highly deformable natural deposits such as collapsible and swelling soils make up more than one-fifth of the land surface and are generally in unsaturated conditions, behavioral measurement of this type of soil including accurate measurement of its hydraulic properties is important. The challenges of designing and implementing construction infrastructure, along with the most reported financial losses due to the presence of these soils, double the importance of studying the behavior of these soils. The large volume changes of these soils in contact with water (equivalent to a volumetric strain of more than 5%) has been a major challenge for researchers in predicting the... 

Ground subsidence refers to the gradual downward movement of the ground’s surface, often occurring on a large scale due to excessive extraction from aquifers. Nowadays, climatic changes and global warming are fundamental phenomena that can lead to the drying of surface layers of the soil. From a geomechanical and environmental geotechnics perspective, this phenomenon can pose risks such as cracking and increased intensity of ground subsidence. Ground subsidence in cracked soils does not occur uniformly. The rate of subsidence in cracked parts differs from that in uncracked parts. The presence of pathways for increased energy and moisture exchange between the soil and the atmosphere through... 

This study develops a new framework for the assessment of land subsidence occurrence rate. The proposed framework considers the combined effects of saturated and unsaturated soil behavior. Accordingly, the biot consolidation theory was used for investigating subsidence in the saturated zone while the soil shrinkage curve, i.e., the void ratio-suction curve, was used in the determination of unsaturated zone subsidence. Specifically, groundwater decline and land climate change were used as the main contributing factor in investigating the land subsidence in the saturated and unsaturated zone, respectively. The approach presented in this study is based on using numerical modeling in PLAXIS 2D... 

Leaking of leachate contamination into the clayey isolation layer at the bottom of the landfills is one of the most important environmental issues, which influences living creatures' lives by affecting groundwater quality. Coupled phenomena that play a role in contamination and fluid transportation in a saturated clayey layer are hydraulic and osmotic flow, diffusion and convection. The targeted contaminate of leachate is monovalent salts. The clayey layer is also saturated. According to the governing differential equation, membrane efficiency and hydraulic conductivity coefficients highly affect the contamination transport. Experimental results and existing models have shown that these... 

The soil-water retention curves (SWRC) is an unsaturated soil mechanics hydro chemical state surface, which expresses the relationship between the soil suction and water content. The soil-water retention curve could describe the water adsorption and desorption process that happened in soils. The difference between the desorption or drying retention curve and the adsorption or wetting retention curves in a specific soil specimen indicates the hydraulic hysteresis phenomenon. Generally, the amount of water remaining in the drying process is greater than the amount of water adsorbed in the wetting process at a certain amount of suction. Suction due to the combined effects of capillary and... 

Oil pollutants are among the important sources of pollution in countries with oil and gas industries such as Iran. Soil pollution by these pollutants is one of the environmental issues and hazards. All kinds of organic and inorganic pollutants in the soil may penetrate the underground water or enter the atmosphere in the form of gas, which respectively enters the food chain through absorption by plants or enter the body of living organisms through breathing. They include humans, which are a threat to the health and life of living beings. For example, many of these pollutions cause diseases such as cancer, suppression of the body's immune system, or even obesity; therefore, it is necessary to... 

Rainfall is a primary trigger for initiating landslides. It primarily increases soil moisture and reduces matric suction, leading to a decrease in soil shear strength and consequently causing landslides. In light of global warming and the growing emphasis on environmentally friendly methods, the use of vegetation to fulfill engineering and environmental requirements in slope engineering has recently garnered attention. Vegetation reinforces slopes through both hydraulic and mechanical means. To survive, vegetation perform photosynthesis, absorbing water from the soil surface and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This water absorption increases matric suction, thereby enhancing soil shear... 

Earth dams are among the most important and widely used civil structures, playing a significant role in water supply, energy production, and flood control. Monitoring dam behavior provides professionals with insights into its performance over time. Dam displacement is a crucial factor in deformation and potential failure, making it essential to use various measurement tools to control deformation and numerous simulation models to analyze data and monitor the dam continuously. However, it is not always possible to record data regularly and without disturbance, and some dams may lack these measurement tools altogether. In such cases, new technologies like remote sensing can significantly aid... 

Capsule endoscopy is a minimally invasive diagnostic technology for gastrointestinal diseases providing images from the human’s digestion system. Developing a robust and real-time localization algorithm to determine the orientation and position of the endoscopic capsule is a crucial step toward medical diagnostics. In this thesis, we propose a novel model-aided real-time localization approach to estimate the position and orientation of a magnetic endoscopic capsule swimming inside the stomach. In the proposed method, the governing equations of the motion of an ellipsoidal capsule inside the fluid, considering different hydrodynamics interactions, are derived. Then, based on the dynamic...