Abstract This report presents an analysis of the process of oxygen-limited biodegradation in groundwater@ incorporating the effects of natural aquifer heterogeneities. Three-dimensional analytical and numerical treatments of this problem are developed based on a stochastic methodology that conceives the spatially variable hydrogeologic@ chemical and microbiological processes as realizations of a random process. The analytical portion of this work entails the derivation of closed form expressions for effective transport and transformation coefficients for a reactive@ two-component system. A new computational procedure has been developed to solve two-component reactive transport problems in random velocity fields. Within this framework@ features of the field scale characteristics of plume biodegradation are explored. Longitudinal macrodispersivities for the contaminant and dissolved oxygen differed significantly@ and were found to be considerably affected by biodegradation. The effective retardation factors and biodecay rate were found to be less affected over most concentration regimes. The applicability of the results to field scale contamination problems is demonstrated on two actual field sites at Borden@ Ontario and Traverse City@ Michigan. The limitations and impact of the presented approach are discussed regarding data collection guidance and modeling of multicomponent transport and transformation in three dimensionally heterogeneous porous media.
API DR192-1994 history
1994API DR192-1994 Modeling Oxygen-Transport Limited Biodegradation in Three-Dimensionally Heterogeneous Aquifers