Investigation Of Chaotic Advection In A Groundwater Remediation System
Kulha, Katherine H 1 ; Neupauer, Roseanna M 2 ; Mays, David C 3
1 University of Colorado - Boulder
2 University of Colorado - Boulder
3 University of Colorado - Denver
Remediation of contaminated groundwater is a costly but often necessary process. Above ground pump-and-treat remediation processes have many well known limitations which have led to widespread use of in-situ remediation. However, laminar flow through a porous media inherently lacks the turbulence necessary to allow mixing between the injected treatment solution and the contaminated groundwater. Flows that exhibit deterministic chaos lead to much higher degrees of spreading and mixing. In this study, a treatment solution is inserted in the center of a contaminated region. Four wells are placed in the contaminated region but outside of the interface. An engineered sequence of injections and extractions of water at the four wells is used to spread the treatment solution plume. The injection/extraction scheme is based on a previously developed scheme that resulted in some plume spreading by stretching and folding the fluid interface. The goal of this study is to use chaotic advection theory to quantify the degree of stretching and folding in the new injection/extraction scheme. A suite of Matlab codes are used to track the fluid interface through the new injection/extraction scheme and to identify features of chaotic advection.