Handbook of Environmental Engineering

10Environmental Fluid Mechanics

Nigel B. Kaye¹, Abdul A. Khan¹, and Firat Y. Testik²

¹ Glenn Department of Civil Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

² Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

Environmental fluid mechanics is an enormous field covering a vast range of scales from mixing of oceans and lakes, heat trapping in urban areas (urban heat island effect), pollutant dispersion in rivers and streams, heat flows through buildings, and all the way down to pollutant transport through rock and soil pores. Fluid mechanics is ubiquitous in the field of environmental engineering as the majority of environmental heat and pollutant transport processes are driven by fluid flows. There are many books entirely devoted to various topics in the field of environmental fluid mechanics (Boeker and van Grondelle, 1999; Rubin and Atkinson, 2001; Fernando, 2013; Imberger, 2013), and the reader is referred to these books for more details on the field as a whole or with regard to particular topics. Given the enormous scope of the field (the handbook of environmental fluid dynamics (Fernando, 2013) has 81 chapters and over 1100 pages in 2 volumes), this chapter can only provide a brief overview of the dominant processes that control heat, mass, and pollutant transport in the environment. The material presented in this chapter is quite theoretical and, at times, abstract, with the goal of providing the mathematical underpinnings ...