Ground-water solute transport with hydrogeochemical reactions

Chemical contamination of ground water is typically associated with multicomponent solutions of reactive substances, the mobility of which is affected by their reactivity. In predicting geochemical transport, it is therefore important that the liquid and solid phase reactions be modeled, along with the flow-controlled processes. This demanding task is typically carried out on powerful computers. Frequently, however, field data are available for a limited number of species, or, a small number of species suffices to characterize ground-water quality. In such cases it is desirable to be able to model the transport on a widely available class of inexpensive computers. We report on the development of a 2-D model for the transport of reactive species that runs efficiently on PCs. The model follows a modified one-step procedure that adopts total (aqueous and adsorbed) concentrations and aqueous concentrations of components, and accounts for aqueous complexation and for competitive sorption via isotherms or selectivity coefficients. The use of principal directions of transport coordinates, dimensional splitting, and a specialized algorithm for handling advection-dominated transport render it compact and efficient. Mass conservation is satisfied with high accuracy.