Abstract. Groundwater can be stored abundantly in granula-composed aquifers with high
permeability. The microstructure of granular materials has important effect
on the permeability of aquifers and the contaminant migration and remediation
in aquifers is also influenced by the characteristics of porous media. In
this study, two different microscale arrangements of sand particles are
compared to reveal the effects of microstructure on the contaminant migration
and remediation. With the help of fractal theory, the mathematical
expressions of permeability and entry pressure are conducted to delineate
granular materials with regular triangle arrangement (RTA) and square pitch
arrangement (SPA) at microscale. Using a sequential Gaussian simulation (SGS)
method, a synthetic heterogeneous site contaminated by perchloroethylene
(PCE) is then used to investigate the migration and remediation affected by
the two different microscale arrangements. PCE is released from an
underground storage tank into the aquifer and the surfactant is used to clean
up the subsurface contamination. Results suggest that RTA can not only cause
more groundwater contamination, but also make remediation become more
difficult. The PCE remediation efficiency of 60.01–99.78 % with a mean
of 92.52 and 65.53–99.74 % with a mean of 95.83 % is achieved for
200 individual heterogeneous realizations based on the RTA and SPA,
respectively, indicating that the cleanup of PCE in aquifer with SPA is
significantly easier. This study leads to a new understanding of the
microstructures of porous media and demonstrates how microscale arrangements
control contaminant migration in aquifers, which is helpful to design
successful remediation scheme for underground storage tank spill.
About Two-dimensional Mathematical Model of Contaminant Migration in Unsaturated Catalytic Porous Media with Traps
