Post-remediation soil, ground and surface water monitoring is essential to assess the effectiveness of remediation efforts undertaken to eliminate or minimize the risk of pollution to human health and valuable ecosystems. In that regard, comparison of pollution levels pre- and post-remediation is an effective way of evaluating the effectiveness of the remediation techniques used. Thus, this study sought to measure concentrations of pollutants in the soil, ground and surface water post remediation in Steel Valley, Vanderbijlpark and compare them to concentration levels prior to remediation, as well as compare them to internationally accepted standards with respect to risk to humans and the environment. Water samples were collected from three locations within the study site, in both the dry and rainy seasons and their physio-chemical and organic properties were tested. Soil samples were collected from six different locations within the study site and analysed for metal concentrations. The data was compared against that of the Iron and Steel Corporation (ISCOR) Vanderbijlpark Environmental Master Plan (EMP), water and soil guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) as well as South African water and soil guidelines. The study found that groundwater is generally safe for domestic use but Aluminium (Al), Iron (Fe) and Manganese (Mn) concentrations were above South African water quality guideline levels – with their concentrations ranging from 0.54 to 0.91 mg/L, 1.01 to 1.86 mg/L and 0.24 to 0.53 mg/L respectively. There were no traces of organic pollution in the water samples. Soil samples had levels of Al ranging from 1106 mg/kg to 1 3621 mg/kg, Mn concentrations in the range of 202.8 to 966.4 mg/kg and Fe ranging from 1 1587 to 23 201 mg/kg. Thus, water and soil at the selected sites are safe in terms of physico-chemical and organic quality. Natural attenuation should be able, over time, to further reduce the levels of parameters that are currently above the target range. Thus, there has been considerable reduction in pollutant concentrations, but as this study was limited in scope, additional research is needed to verify the results. / Environmental Sciences / M. Sc. (Environmental Science)

Cette thèse porte sur l’étude de quelques questions liées à l’identifiabilité et l’identification d’un problème inverse non-linéaire de source. Il s’agit de l’identification d’une source ponctuelle dépendante du temps constituant le second membre d’une équation de type advection-dispersion-réaction à coefficients variables. Dans le cas monodimensionnel, la souplesse du modèle stationnaire nous a permis de développer des réponses théoriques concernant le nombre des capteurs nécessaires et leurs emplacements permettant d’identifier la source recherchée d’une façon unique. Ces résultats nous ont beaucoup aidés à définir la ligne de conduite à suivre afin d’apporter des réponses similaires pour le modèle transitoire. Quant au modèle bidimensionnel transitoire, en utilisant quelques résultats de nulle contrôlabilité frontière et des mesures de l’état sur la frontière sortie et de son flux sur la frontière entrée du domaine étudié, nous avons établi un théorème d’identifiabilité et une méthode d’identification permettant de localiser les deux coordonnées de la position de la source recherchée comme étant l’unique solution d’un système non-linéaire de deux équations, et de transformer l’identification de sa fonction de débit en la résolution d’un problème de déconvolution. La dernière partie de cette thèse discute la difficulté principale rencontrée dans ce genre de problèmes inverses à savoir la non identifiabilité d’une source dans sa forme abstraite, propose une alternative permettant de surmonter cette difficulté dans le cas particulier où le but est d’identifier le temps limite à partir duquel la source impliquée a cessé d’émettre, et donc ouvre la porte sur de nouveaux horizons. / The thesis deals with the two main issues identifiability and identification related to a nonlinear inverse source problem. This problem consists in the identification of a time-dependent point source occurring in the right hand-side of an advection-dispersion-reaction equation with spatially varying coefficients. Starting from the stationnary case in the one-dimensional model, we derived theoritical results defining the necessary number of sensors and their positions that enable to uniquely determine the sought source. Those results gave us a good visibility on how to proceed in order to obtain similar results for the time-dependent (evolution) case. As far as the two-dimensional evolution model is concerned, using some boundary null controllability results and the records of the generated state on the inflow boundary and its flux on the outflow boundary of the monitored domain, we established a constructive identifiability theorem as well as an identification method that localizes the two coordinates of the sought source position as the unique solution of a nonlinear system of two equations and transforms the identification of its time-dependent intensity function into solving a deconvolution problem. The last part of this thesis highlights the main difficulty encountred in such inverse problems namely the nonidentifiabilityof a source in its abstract form, proposes a method that enables to overcome this difficulty in the particular case where the aim is to identify the time active limit of the involved source. And thus, this last part opens doors on new horizons and prospects.