Contaminant Source Solutions with Scale-Dependent Dispersivities
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 3, Issue 4
Abstract
It has been known for a number of years that dispersivities increase with the scale of a ground-water dispersion experiment, but little appears to be known about the effect of this scale dependency on solutions of the dispersion equation. Solutions of the dispersion equation with dispersivities that increase directly with the first power of the flow length are obtained here for unsteady flow from instantaneous sources and for steady flow from continuous sources in one, two, and three spatial dimensions. When compared with corresponding solutions for constant dispersivity models, these solutions show less dispersion at smaller values of x and more dispersion at larger values of x. In addition, points of maximum concentration for an instantaneous source move with slightly slower speeds, and concentrations upstream from the initial source release point are exactly zero for all time. The chief advantage of using these solutions is that they are likely to hold over a range of values for x, whereas constant dispersivity solutions are accurate only for the single value of x used to calculate dispersivities.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 3 • Issue 4 • October 1998
Pages: 268 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Published online: Oct 1, 1998
Published in print: Oct 1998
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