International INTRAVAL project. Phase 2, working group 1 report. Flow and tracer experiments in unsaturated tuff and soil. Las Cruces trench and Apache Leap tuff studies

摘要

The Working Group 1 final report summarizes two test case studies, the Las Cruces Trench (LCT), and Apache Leap Tuff Site (ALTS) experiments. The objectives of these two field studies were to evaluate models for water flow and contaminant transport in unsaturated, heterogeneous soils and fractured tuff. The LCT experiments were specifically designed to test various deterministic and stochastic models of water flow and solute transport in heterogeneous, unsaturated soils. Experimental data from the first two LCT experiments, and detailed field characterization studies provided information for developing and calibrating the models. Comparative analyses included: point comparisons of water content; predicted mean behavior for water flow; point comparisons of solute concentrations; and predicted mean behavior for tritium transport. These analyses indicated that no model, whether uniform or heterogeneous, proved superior. Since the INTRAVAL study, however, a new method has been developed for conditioning the hydraulic properties used for flow and transport modeling based on the initial field-measured water content distributions and a set of scale-mean hydraulic parameters. Very good matches between the observed and simulated flow and transport behavior were obtained using the conditioning procedure, without model calibration. The ALTS experiments were designed to evaluate characterization methods and their associated conceptual models for coupled matrix-fracture continua over a range of scales (i.e., 2.5 centimeter rock samples; 10 centimeter cores; 1 meter block; and 30 meter boreholes). Within these spatial scales, laboratory and field tests were conducted for estimating pneumatic, thermal, hydraulic, and transport property values for different conceptual models. The analyses included testing of current conceptual, mathematical and physical models using the ALTS characterisation data. (authors). 48 refs. (Atomindex citation 29:006374)