Stochastic analysis of transport of conservative solutes in caisson experiments

The Los Alamos National Laboratory has conducted in the past a series of experiments of transport of conservative and reactive solutes. The experimental setup and the experimental results are presented in a series of reports. The main aim of the experiments was to validate models of transport of solutes in unsaturated flow at the caisson intermediate scale, which is much larger than the one pertaining to laboratory columns. First attempts to analyze the experimental results were by one-dimensional convective-dispersion models. These models could not explain the observed solute breakthrough curves and particularly the large solute dispersion in the caisson effluent Since there were some question marks about the uniformity of water distribution at the caisson top, the transport experiments were repeated under conditions of saturated flow. In these experiments constant heads were applied at the top and the bottom of the caisson and the number of concentration monitoring stations was quadrupled. The analysis of the measurements by the same one-dimensional model indicated clearly that the fitted dispersivity is much larger than the pore-sole dispersivity and that it grows with the distance in an approximately linear fashion. This led to the conclusion, raised before, that transport in the caisson is dominated by heterogeneity effects, i.e. by spatial variability of the material Such effects cannot be captured by traditional one-dimensional models. In order to account for the effect of heterogeneity, the saturated flow experiments have been analyzed by using stochastic transport modeling. The apparent linear growth of dispersivity with distance suggested that the system behaves like a stratified one. Consequently, the model of Dagan and Bresier has been adopted in order to interpret concentration measurements. In this simple model the caisson is viewed as a bundle of columns of different permeabilities, which are characterized by a p.d.f. (probability denasity function)