COMPARISON STUDY OF MICROSCOPIC AND MACROSCOPIC APPROACHES IN SUBSURFACE CONTAMINANT TRANSPORT

摘要

Despite recent advances, the practice of contaminant transport and remediation has shown that remediation efforts are often plagued by extremely long breakthrough curve tails, an indication of almost infinite time requirements for the remediation efforts to bring the level of contaminants below the regulatory standards. One hypothesis is that these long tails are the manifestation of very slow diffusive processes in soil micropore zones (12). This study compares the effects of micropores at macroscopic and microscopic levels and establishes a link between these approaches for validation and calibration purposes. The link between macroscopic and microscopic levels is established through comparisons and testing of the two models while incorporating appropriate scale and boundary effects. Despite the differences in conceptual approaches and simulation time, the two approaches rendered meaningful results. The link helps forecast the effects of micropore zone transport processes in the subsurface efficiently and thus allows development of tools that could contribute towards more efficient remediation design.