Analytical Study of Airflow Induced by Barometric Pressure and Groundwater Head Fluctuations in a Two-Layered Unsaturated Zone

摘要

A study on subsurface airflow plays a vital role in quantifying the effectiveness of natural attenuation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or in determining the need of engineering systems (e.g., soil vapor extraction of VOCs). Here, we present a new analytical solution for describing the subsurface airflow induced by barometric pressure and groundwater head fluctuations. The solution improves a previously published semi-analytical solution into a fully explicit expression and can save much computation efforts when it was used to estimate the soil permeability and porosity, which was demonstrated by a hypothetical example. If the groundwater head and barometric pressure fluctuations have the same frequency and the same order of magnitude for the amplitudes, each or the combination of both fluctuations will generate the air exchange volumes of the same order of magnitude through the ground surface. Particularly, the air exchange volume caused by the combined fluctuations increases with the upper layer's permeability and lower layer's porosity and decreases with the phase difference between these two fluctuations, fluctuation frequency, and the upper layer's thickness. The air exchange volume may decrease quickly to zero essentially when the upper layer's permeability decreases 10-fold and decrease fourfold to fivefold when the phase difference decreases from n to zero.