Influence of the lateral source/building separation on vapour intrusion: A numerical study

Abstract

Various vapour intrusion (VI) models have been proposed in order to predict indoor concentration of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in buildings. However, these models tend to be conservative, and overestimate or underestimate vapour flux emissions due to several assumptions. Particularly, most of these VI models only consider an infinite uniform contaminated groundwater as the principal source of VOCs in the soil, and lateral pollution source in the vadose zone are disregarded. It has been shown that ignoring the lateral source position may lead to uncertainties on the estimations. In this paper, a numerical model is developed in order to better understand the relationship between the lateral source position in the soil, including both a source in the vadose zone and a source located at the groundwater level, and the resulting indoor air concentration. Results show that source position plays a significant role on vapour intrusion attenuation. In fact, indoor concentration of VOCs decreases with increasing lateral separation. Finally, it is shown that considering the source position can significantly improve the quality of VI predictions.