A Benchmark Solution for Infiltration and Adsorption of Polluted Water Into Unsaturated–Saturated Porous Media

Abstract

We discuss the numerical modeling of the infiltration of contaminated water into unsaturated porous media. A system with contaminant transport, dispersion, and adsorption is considered. The mathematical model for unsaturated flow is based on Richards nonlinear and degenerate equation. Nonlinear adsorption is represented by adsorption isotherms and kinetic rates. An accurate numerical method is constructed in 1D which can be a good candidate for the solution of inverse problems to determine model parameters in the adsorption part of the model. Our numerical solution is based on the method of lines (MOL method) where space discretization leads to the corresponding system of ODEs. We substantially use the numerical modeling of interfaces, separating fully saturated, partially saturated, and dry zones in the underground. Finally, in a series of numerical experiments and in comparisons with HYDRUS (Simunek et al., The HYDRUS-1D software package for simulating the one-dimensional movement of water, heat, and multiple solutes in variably/saturated media, version 2.0, Rep. IGWMC-TPS-70, 202 pp., Int. Groundwater Model. Cent., Colo. Sch of Mines, Golden, Colo), we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.