Transport in Groundwater Flow: Simulations and Applications to Environmental Risk Assessment
by
Franz Konecny
Institute of Mathematics and Applied Statistics, University of Agricultural Sciences Vienna

The problem of assessing groundwater pollution has become a matter of considerable concern. For proper groundwater management, it is necessary to model the contamination mathematically in order to assess the effects of contamination and predict the transport of contaminants. Several deterministic models have been proposed and numerical procedures developed. Because of aquifer heterogenity, the the spatial variation of flow properties is erratic. Therefore a stochastic model of flow regime and transport processes is more realistic.

In this talk we are concerned with modeling contaminant transport in heterogeneous porous media viewing the velocity as a random field. We apply random walk particle tracking (RWPT) for simulating transport. As a result we obtain the distribution of concentration rather than single estimates as a probabilistic description to be used in risk assessment. The risk of the contaminant transport is defined as the probability that the that the concentration exceeds a maximum acceptable upper limit. Moreover, we analyse the sensitivity of exceedance probabilities with respect to variations of certain physical parameters of the transmissivity field, porosity and dispersivity.

Date received: November 22, 2002

Copyright © 2002 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Mathematical Conference Abstracts. Document # cakd-33.