An assessment of surface water chemistry with its possible sources of pollution around the Barapukuria Thermal Power Plant impacted area, Dinajpur, Bangladesh

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing the current hydrochemical condition for understanding the factors and processes controlling the chemical composition of surface water with their possible relation to environmental pollution around the Barapukuria Thermal Power Plant (BTPP) impacted area. In this study, the Hill-piper diagram, ratio plots and cross plots were used to recognize the various hydrogeochemical mechanisms involved in the evolution of the water chemistry and quality around the area. The basic statistics, IQR value, correlation matrix, cluster analysis were appealed to implicate the complex interrelationships between the ionic components of water. The principal component (PC) and factor analysis (FA) were computed to detect the possible source of water environmental pollution influenced either by natural or multiple anthropogenic sources like BTPP, existing agriculture activity and so on. The Hill-piper diagram presents two distinct hydrochemical facies such as CaHCO3 and Ca-Mg-Cl facies. The PC/FA revealed that three principal components explained about 63.63% of the total variability. The factor 2 indicated active mixing environmental process like natural and anthropogenic influence. Whereas the high positive loading ions like SiO2, Cr3+, PO3-4, As3+, Cd2+ and Fe3+ of factors 1 and 3 represent the existence of industrial waste like BTPP while waste water with fly ash has high affinity with such components of water bodies. Thus these results confirmed that discharged from BTPP is the possible source of water environmental pollution for present and future.