A REVIEW OF SOLUTE TRANSPORT MODELING IN SOILS AND HYDRODYNAMIC DISPERSIVITY

Abstract

The knowledge of solute transport process in the porous media has an important role for addressing chemical pollution, loss of nutrients, groundwater contaminating rate and drainage water quality. The aim of this paper was to review the hydrodynamic dispersivity parameter and the models of dispersion - mass and stochastic to evaluate the solute transport process in soils. Solute transport models, convective - dispersive Equation (CDE) and convective lognormal transfer (CLT) are fitted to experimental breakthrough curves (BTC’s) and solute transport parameters are estimated. It should be investigated which of the CDE or CLT model explain the BTCs more reliably. The review indicates that the soil physical properties and experiment conditions can determine the appropriate model that characterizes the BTCs. The travel time distribution and the variance of solute molecule velocities vary with flow rate. Mohammadi and Vanclooster (2012) indicated that the mean solute travel time, I¼t, increases partially with the travel distance and decreases with the flow rate. The review shows that the mean travel time distribution depends on the flow rate. Generally, well - controlled solute transport experiments on soils are essential to the knowledge of the solute transport processes and parameters for different flow rates and soil types.