Dispersion of a fluid plume during radial injection in an aquifer

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical model for fluid dispersion during radial injection in aquifers, accounting for mechanical dispersion effects on interface behavior and concentration profiles, relevant for environmental and engineering applications.

Contribution

It extends existing models by incorporating mechanical dispersion into the analytical solutions for fluid flow and concentration in aquifers during radial injection.

Findings

Concentration decays smoothly around the interface, extending beyond the immiscible boundary.

The model provides a way to predict concentration profiles analytically.

Implications for defining boundaries in injection well operations.

Abstract

This study outlines a model for injected fluid flow in a vertically confined porous aquifer with mechanical dispersion. Existing studies have investigated the behaviour and geometry of immiscible fluid flow in this setting, where the injected fluid displaces the resident fluid, forming a sharp interface between the two. The present study extends analytical solutions to include mechanical dispersion of the interface. The solutions are inverted to solve for time as a function of position (r,z), giving each position in the aquifer an intersection time corresponding to the moment the travelling interface intersects a point of interest. The set of (r0,z0) positions which share an intersection time are treated as dummy variables that represent an 'effective surface' and are integrated over to solve for the velocity field within the aquifer. Using this velocity field, the concentration profile resulting from mechanical dispersion can be found analytically.It is shown that the concentration of the injected fluid smoothly decays around the position of the interface from immiscible solutions, allowing for the injected fluid to be present in detectable quantities beyond the extent of these interfaces. This concentration spread should be considered in defining outer boundaries on fluids in injection well applications such as carbon capture and storage or groundwater applications.