Solute Injection

SOLVED WITH COMSOL MULTIPHYSICS 3.5a

COPYRIGHT 2008. All right reserved. No part of this documentation may be photocopied or reproduced in any form without prior written consent from COMSOL AB. COMSOL, COMSOL Multiphysics, COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab, and FEMLAB are registered trademarks of COMSOL AB. Other product or brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

Solute Injection
Introduction
Predicting the transport of contaminants that move with subsurface fluids generally means analyzing at least two physics. This model tracks a contaminant that enters an at a point, such as an injection well or toxic spill, and spreads through the aquifer with time. The model has an analytic solution developed by Wilson and Miller (Ref. 1), which has been used to test several dedicated fluid flow and transport codes. The particular problem in this model comes from the MT3DMS manual of Zheng and Wang (Ref. 2). The analysis models steady-state fluid flow and follows up with a transient solute-transport simulation; it employs the Darcys Law application mode and the Solute Transport application mode from the Earth Science Module. In COMSOL Multiphysics it is straightforward to specify a fluid velocity without solving a flow problem. This example solves for the velocities to demonstrate the mechanics of coupling flow and transport simulations in one model file. The example also shows how to use the solver settings for the combined steady-state and transient solution. The instructions detail how to model a point source using the point flux settings available in the Earth Science Module. The first section in this discussion gives an overview of the problem. Next it gives the equations and describes how the fluid flow and the solute transport application modes link in COMSOL Multiphysics. Next come a few implementation details including a table of model data. The results shown next then illustrate various postprocessing options. The last section describes how to build the model using the COMSOL Multiphysics graphical user interface.

Model Definition
In this example, there is regional flow from left to right across a 450 m-by-300 m aquifer. The fluid moves at a Darcy velocity of 0.11 m/d. The aquifer has homogeneous and isotropic material properties. A point source releases a small amount of fluid into the aquifer at 1 m3/d, a release rate small enough for the flow field to remain uniform. The injected fluid carries a nonreactive solute at a concentration of 1000 ppm. The contaminant migrates by advection and dispersion

SOLUTE INJECTION

and never reaches a boundary. The aquifer is initially pristine with concentrations everywhere equal to zero. The only source of contaminant is the injection, so flow through the inlet has zero concentration. The period of interest is one year.
FLUID FLOW

Darcys law describes the fluid flow in this problem. With the hydraulic-head formulation, the governing equation is ( K H ) = Qs where K is hydraulic conductivity (m/d), H is hydraulic head (m), and Qs is the volume flow rate of fluid per unit volume of aquifer (d1). The point source is W - ( x x i, y yi ) Q s = ---b where W is the volumetric pumping rate W (m3/d); b is the aquifer thickness (m); and denotes the Dirac delta function, which is nonzero only in the point (xi, yi), where xi and yi are the well coordinates. Because the flow field is at steady state, you can obtain a unique solution by specifying the model geometry, the point source, the material properties, and the boundary conditions. The problem statement gives the hydraulic head at the inlet and the outlet and indicates symmetry conditions on the sides. In the Darcys Law application mode, you express these boundary conditions as n (KH) = 0 H = H in H=0 Sides Inlet Outlet

where n is the unit vector normal to the boundary.

COUPLING

The groundwater-flow and solute-transport equations given here are linked by the Darcy velocity, u = K H , which gives the specific flux (m/d) of fluid across an infinitesimal surface representing both the solids and the pore spaces. COMSOL Multiphysics computes the Darcy velocity vector u, which consists of the x and y directional velocities denoted by u and v, respectively.

SOLUTE INJECTION

S O L U T E TR A N S P O R T

The advection-dispersion equation governs solute transport in this problem: c - + ( s D L c + u c ) = S c s ---t Here DL is the hydrodynamic dispersion tensor (m2/d); s denotes the fluid volume fraction; c gives the dissolved concentration (kg/m3); u is the Darcy velocity (m/d); and Sc represents the quantity of solute added per unit volume of porous medium per unit time (kg/(m3d)). The entries for the dispersion tensor are ui uj - + 2 ----- D Lii = 1 -----u u uiuj D Lij = D Lji = ( 1 2 ) ---------u where DLii are the principal components of the dispersion tensor; DLij are the cross terms; represents the dispersivity (m); and the subscripts 1 and 2 denote longitudinal and transverse flow, respectively. In this problem, Sc represents the solute injected at the point well, which is defined by W - c ( x x i, y y i ) Sc = Q s c Q = ---b Q where cQ is the concentration of the solute in the water (kg/m3). You implement the solute injection with the same logic as the fluid point source. The problem statement specifies that the only contaminant source in the aquifer is the point well, and that the boundaries far enough from the injection well for the contaminant never to leave the model domain. You thus set the inlet concentration to zero and assign the other boundaries an advective flux. The expressions for these boundary conditions are n ( s D L c ) = 0 c=0 n ( s D L c ) = 0 Sides Inlet Outlet
2 2

where n is the unit vector normal to the boundary.

SOLUTE INJECTION

Model Data
Build the model with the following data:
PARAMETER NAME VALUE

K f g u W b Hin s 1 2 cs

Hydraulic conductivity Fluid density Gravity Darcy velocity Pumping rate Aquifer thickness Inlet head Porosity Longitudinal dispersivity Transverse horizontal dispersivity Solute concentration at source

1 m/d 1000 kg/m3 9.82 m/s2 0.11 m/d 1 m3/d 10 m 45 m 0.3 10 m 3m 1000 ppm

SOLUTE INJECTION

Results
Figure 1 shows the solution to the steady-state flow problem. The hydraulic head drops from the inlet to the outlet, and the velocity field is almost uniform, as required in the problem statement (Ref. 1).

Figure 1: COMSOL Multiphysics solution of almost uniform Darcy flow in a domain with a small point leak. Shown are the hydraulic head (surface plot) and velocity field (arrows).

SOLUTE INJECTION

Figure 2: COMSOL Multiphysics results for the solute-transport problem are a near perfect match to the analytic solution of Ref. 1, which is shown with the numerical estimates of Ref. 2. Figure 3 illustrates the evolution of the contaminant plume with snapshots at 30 days, 100 days, and 360 days. The solute plume spreads with time but never reaches the boundary. In creating these plots, the author clipped off concentrations below 0.1 ppm and used an expression containing logical operators to give the same shading to zones with concentrations of 50 ppm or greater.

SOLUTE INJECTION

Figure 3: Concentrations at 30 days (top left), 100 days (top right), and 360 days (bottom) for 2D fluid flow and solute transport for a continuously injecting point source; shown are concentrations from 0.1 ppm to 50 ppm or greater. In the user interface you can interactively view the value at a given point by either clicking at the point of interest or entering the point coordinates to trigger a numeric readout. You can also obtain numeric results for the arbitrary expressions along a line or within a subdomain using cross-section and domain plots. The cross sections in Figure 4 and Figure 5, for example, illustrate the advective and dispersive components of the solute flux. The flux from chemical diffusion is zero. The COMSOL Multiphysics solution shown here gives results along the line y = 150 m at 10, 30, 90, 180, and 360 days.

SOLUTE INJECTION

Figure 4: Advective flux along y = 150 m at 10, 30, 90, 180, and 360 days.

Figure 5: Dispersive flux along y = 150 m at 10, 30, 90, 180, and 360 days.

SOLUTE INJECTION

Figure 6 gives the solute concentration as a combined color and height plot.

Figure 6: Solute concentrations from 0.1 ppm to 50 ppm at 360 days.

References
1. J.L. Wilson and P.J. Miller, 2D plume in uniform ground-water flow, J. Hyd. Div., ASCE , vol. 4, pp. 503514, 1978. 2. C. Zheng and P. Wang, MT3DMS: A Modular Three-Dimensional Multispecies Transport Model for Simulation of Advection, Dispersion and Chemical Reactions of Contaminants in Groundwater Systems , University of Alabama, 1998.

SOLUTE INJECTION