Reactive solute transport in physically and chemically heterogeneous porous media with multimodal reactive mineral facies: The Lagrangian approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a Lagrangian stochastic approach to analyze reactive solute dispersion in heterogeneous porous media, highlighting the influence of hydraulic conductivity and sorption heterogeneity on transport behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Lagrangian-based model for multimodal reactive mineral facies, incorporating heterogeneity effects on reactive transport in 3D anisotropic media.

Findings

Correlation between K and Kd significantly affects dispersion.

Anisotropy ratio has negligible impact on reactive dispersion.

Changing mean, variance, and scale of K and Kd influences dispersion patterns.

Abstract

Physical and chemical heterogeneities have a large impact on reactive transport in porous media. Examples of heterogeneous attributes affecting reactive mass transport are the hydraulic conductivity (K), and the equilibrium sorption distribution coefficient (Kd). This paper uses the Deng et al. (2013) conceptual model for multimodal reactive mineral facies and a Lagrangian-based stochastic theory in order to analyze the reactive solute dispersion in three-dimensional anisotropic heterogeneous porous media with hierarchical organization of reactive minerals. An example based on real field data is used to illustrate the time evolution trends of reactive solute dispersion. The results show that the correlation between the hydraulic conductivity and the equilibrium sorption distribution coefficient does have a significant effect on reactive solute dispersion. The anisotropy ratio does not have a significant effect on reactive solute dispersion. Furthermore, through a sensitivity analysis we investigate the impact of changing the mean, variance, and integral scale of K and Kd on reactive solute dispersion.