EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF SOLUTE TRANSPORT THROUGH THREE-DIMENSIONAL POROUS MEDIA

Abstract

Groundwater resources serve as a major source of drinking water. The hydrogeological properties of subsurface zone are responsible for maintaining the quality of groundwater resources. Major processes responsible for determining the quality of groundwater are mainly advection, diffusion, dispersion and sorption. The migration of dissolved contaminants in porous media is mainly controlled by advective transport through the fractures and biopores (such as burrows and movement of roots in soil) combined with diffusion of solutes into the immobile pore water in the soil matrix between fractures. The attenuation of the solute particles due to chemical mixing depends on the nature of the sediment, the contaminant and the geochemical environment. To identify the flow paths for quantification of groundwater discharge, multi-tracer tests were practiced which is an integral investigation method as it allows to estimate effective parameters describing non-reactive and reactive transport processes within an aquifer material (in case of laboratory experiments) between the tracer injection and sampling (Ptak et al, 2004). These experiments are used to identify the existence of immobile water regions. In case, where the porosity and dimension of the system are known, the sFDM model can be used to quantify the volume of immobile water regardless of spatial distribution. (Knorr et al, 2016). The effectiveness of the effluent concentration can be analyzed through laboratory investigation and the physical and chemical characteristics are known (Belhachemi et al, 2011). The present research work highlights the experimental study of solute transport through physical aquifer system in the lab and numerically simulated the breakthrough curves of observed experimental data using advection dispersion equation. The study of flow and solute transport processes in fractured porous medium has increased attention because of its importance to underground natural-resource recovery (Pruess and Narasimhan, 1982). A significant progress has been made towards the understanding and modeling of flow and transport processes in multi porosity permeability medium (Wu, 2000). Liu et al. (2002) and Wu et al. (2004) had given the concept of triple porosity-permeability in geothermic, which considers the diffusivity of geothermal fluid larger in conductive fault than in fractured net and larger in the fractures than in the matrix.