Journal of Environmental Studies

Research Article

Prediction of the Fate of Spent Engine Oil Spill from a Base Transceiver Station in the Unsaturated Zone

Theophilus N1*, Akaranta O2 and Ugwoha E3

1Centre for Occupational Health Safety and Environment, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria
2Department of Pure and Industrial Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria
3Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria
*Address for Correspondence: Theophilus N, Centre for Occupational Health Safety and Environment, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, E-mail: titotheo@gmail.com
Submission: 07 May, 2020; Accepted: 12 June, 2020; Published: 16 June, 2020
Copyright: © 2020 Theophilus N et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In this study, Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was employed to predict the amount of spent engine oil leached/retained in the soil after spilling from generators in a telecommunication base station. The experiment was performed at 27 runs based on RSM design with three independent variables, i.e., soil depth, rainfall intensity and contaminant volume. The ANOVA results show that at the 95% confi dence level, the interactions of contaminant volume with soil depth and rainfall intensity signifi cantly affect the amount of spent engine oil leached/retained. Additionally, a second-order polynomial equation was developed to relate the leached/retained used oil and the independent variables. An optimization carried out showed that the contaminant volume decreases with the amount of spent oil leached. At 50 ml contaminant volume, the amount of oil leached gave 2675.55 mg/l while soil depth is 90cm at a rainfall intensity of 5mm/hr, while 9033.68% of oil is retained in the soil. Minimizing the amount of spent engine oil retained at 4550.4%, the contaminant volume is given as 50ml, and soil depth shows 53.5cm while 7092.1mg/l was leached. The model was validated by comparing experimental data and predicted values, which showed a good agreement as well as %error computation. The fi tted model shows a good agreement between predicted and experimental data at R2 of 0.9587 and 0.9849 for used oil leached/retained. The analysis shows there is a good relationship between the actual and predicted lached and retained concentrations producing a line of best fi t with high correlation coeffi cient and predictive relevance. This implies that the developed model can adequately predict the transport of spent engine oil in the unsaturated zone.