An analytical approach to transient homovalent cation exchange problems

Cation exchange in groundwater is one of the dominant surface reactions that occurs in nature and it carries with it many important environmental implications. The mass transfer of cation exchanging pollutants in groundwater can be described by a series of coupled partial differential equations, involving both aqueous and adsorbed species. The resulting system is mathematically challenging due to the complex nonlinearities that arise, which in turn complicates analytical approaches. While some analytical solutions for simplified problems exist, these typically lack the mechanisms that allow the waters to change their global chemical signature (in terms of total cations present in aqueous form) over time. We propose a methodology to solve the problem of exchanging two homovalent cations by deriving the driving equation for one of the aqueous species. This equation incorporates explicitly a retardation factor and a decay term, both with parameters that can vary in space and time. While the full solution can only be obtained numerically, we provide a solution in terms of a perturbative approach, where the leading terms can be obtained explicitly. The resulting solution provides physical explanations for the possible existence of non-monotonic concentrations for a range of parameters governing cation exchange processe

Particle Density Estimation with Grid-Projected Adaptive Kernels

The reconstruction of smooth density fields from scattered data points is a procedure that has multiple applications in a variety of disciplines, including Lagrangian (particle-based) models of solute transport in fluids. In random walk particle tracking (RWPT) simulations, particle density is directly linked to solute concentrations, which is normally the main variable of interest, not just for visualization and post-processing of the results, but also for the computation of non-linear processes, such as chemical reactions. Previous works have shown the superiority of kernel density estimation (KDE) over other methods such as binning, in terms of its ability to accurately estimate the "true" particle density relying on a limited amount of information. Here, we develop a grid-projected KDE methodology to determine particle densities by applying kernel smoothing on a pilot binning; this may be seen as a "hybrid" approach between binning and KDE. The kernel bandwidth is optimized locally. Through simple implementation examples, we elucidate several appealing aspects of the proposed approach, including its computational efficiency and the possibility to account for typical boundary conditions, which would otherwise be cumbersome in conventional KDE

Spreading due to heterogeneity in two-phase flow

Postprint (published version

Hypermixing in linear shear flow

International audience[1] In this technical note we study mixing in a two‐dimensional linear shear flow. We derive analytical expressions for the concentration field for an arbitrary initial condition in an unbounded two‐dimensional shear flow. We focus on the solution for a point initial condition and study the evolution of (1) the second centered moments as a measure for the plume dispersion, (2) the dilution index as a measure of the mixing state, and (3) the scalar dissipation rate as a measure for the rate of mixing. It has previously been shown that the solute spreading grows with the cube of time and thus is hyperdispersive. Herein we demonstrate that the dilution index increases quadratically with time in contrast to a homogeneous medium, for which it increases linearly. Similarly, the scalar dissipation rate decays as t−3, while for a homogeneous medium it decreases more slowly as t−2. Mixing is much stronger than in a homogeneous medium, and therefore we term the observed behavior hypermixing

The impact of inertial effects on solute dispersion in a channel with periodically varying aperture

International audienceWe investigate solute transport in channels with a periodically varying aperture, when the flow is still laminar but sufficiently fast for inertial effects to be nonnegligible. The flow field is computed for a two-dimensional setup using a finite element analysis, while transport is modeled using a random walk particle tracking method. Recirculation zones are observed when the aspect ratio of the unit cell and the relative aperture fluctuations are sufficiently large; under non-Stokes flow conditions, the flow in non-reversible, which is clearly noticeable by the horizontal asymmetry in the recirculation zones. After characterizing the size and position of the recirculation zones as a function of the geometry and Reynolds number, we investigate the corresponding behavior of the longitudinal effective diffusion coefficient. We characterize its dependence on the molecular diffusion coefficient Dm, the P'eclet number, the Reynolds number, and the geometry. The proposed relation is a generalization of the well-known Taylor-Aris relationship relating the longitudinal dispersion coefficient to Dm and the P'eclet number for a channel of constant aperture at sufficiently low Reynolds number. Inertial effects impact the exponent of the P'eclet number in this relationship; the exponent is controlled by the relative amplitude of aperture fluctuations. For the range of parameters investigated, the measured dispersion coefficient always exceeds that corresponding to the parallel plate geometry under Stokes conditions; in otherwords, boundary fluctuations always result in increased dispersion. The transient approach to the asymptotic regime is also studied and characterized quantitatively. We show that the measured characteristic time to attain asymptotic conditions is controlled by two competing effects: (i) the trapping of particles in the near-immobile zone and, (ii) the enhanced mixing in the central zone where most of the flow takes place (mainstream), due to its thinning

A divide and conquer approach to cope with uncertainty, human health risk, and decision making in contaminant hydrology

Assessing health risk in hydrological systems is an interdisciplinary field. It relies on the expertise in the fields of hydrology and public health and needs powerful translation concepts to provide decision support and policy making. Reliable health risk estimates need to account for the uncertainties and variabilities present in hydrological, physiological, and human behavioral parameters. Despite significant theoretical advancements in stochastic hydrology, there is still a dire need to further propagate these concepts to practical problems and to society in general. Following a recent line of work, we use fault trees to address the task of probabilistic risk analysis and to support related decision and management problems. Fault trees allow us to decompose the assessment of health risk into individual manageable modules, thus tackling a complex system by a structural divide and conquer approach. The complexity within each module can be chosen individually according to data availability, parsimony, relative importance, and stage of analysis. Three differences are highlighted in this paper when compared to previous works: (1) The fault tree proposed here accounts for the uncertainty in both hydrological and health components, (2) system failure within the fault tree is defined in terms of risk being above a threshold value, whereas previous studies that used fault trees used auxiliary events such as exceedance of critical concentration levels, and (3) we introduce a new form of stochastic fault tree that allows us to weaken the assumption of independent subsystems that is required by a classical fault tree approach. We illustrate our concept in a simple groundwater‐related settin

Enhanced mixing in heterogeneous Buckley Leverett flow due to temporal fluctuations

Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version