Environmental Transport Processes: Mass and Pollutant Mixing

Every day, pollutants, nutrients, and chemicals move through our rivers, oceans, atmosphere, and soils. Understanding how these substances disperse is critical for environmental engineers, conservationists, and policy makers working to protect our ecosystems. This text-based course provides a clear, foundational introduction to environmental transport processes. You will transition from basic physical concepts to analyzing real-world mixing and dispersion scenarios, gaining the skills needed to predict contaminant pathways. What you'll learn: - Understand the core principles of advection, diffusion, and dispersion in natural systems. - Apply mass balance equations to model how pollutants spread in rivers, lakes, and the atmosphere. - Analyze the impact of turbulent mixing and shear flow on contaminant transport. - Calculate concentration profiles of substances over time and distance using fundamental transport equations. - Explore modern environmental challenges, including the transport of emerging contaminants like microplastics. - Practice solving environmental transport problems through structured, step-by-step written exercises. You will start with essential terminology, fluid mechanics basics, and the governing physics of mass transfer. From there, you will progress through practical scenarios involving surface waters, groundwater, and atmospheric dispersion, all explained through clear, written breakdowns. This course is designed for beginners, students of civil and environmental engineering, and professionals looking to refresh their understanding of transport phenomena. No advanced engineering background is required to start. Begin your journey into environmental fluid mechanics and master the physics of pollutant transport today.