A semi-analytical solution for linearized multicomponent cation exchange reactive transport in groundwater

Abstract

Cation exchange in groundwater is one of the dominant surface reactions. Mass transfer of cation exchanging pollutants in groundwater is highly nonlinear due to the complex nonlinearities of exchange isotherms. This makes difficult to derive analytical solutions for transport equations. Available analytical solutions are valid only for binary cation exchange transport in 1-D and often disregard dispersion. Here we present a semi-analytical solution for linearized multication exchange reactive transport in steady 1-, 2- or 3-D groundwater flow. Nonlinear cation exchange mass–action–law equations are first linearized by means of a first-order Taylor expansion of log-concentrations around some selected reference concentrations and then substituted into transport equations. The resulting set of coupled partial differential equations (PDEs) are decoupled by means of a matrix similarity transformation which is applied also to boundary and initial concentrations. Uncoupled PDE’s are solved by standard analytical solutions. Concentrations of the original problem are obtained by back-transforming the solution of uncoupled PDEs. The semi-analytical solution compares well with nonlinear numerical solutions computed with a reactive transport code (CORE2D) for several 1-D test cases involving two and three cations having moderate retardation factors. Deviations of the semi-analytical solution from numerical solutions increase with increasing cation exchange capacity (CEC), but do not depend on Peclet number. The semi-analytical solution captures the fronts of ternary systems in an approximate manner and tends to oversmooth sharp fronts for large retardation factors. The semi-analytical solution performs better with reference concentrations equal to the arithmetic average of boundary and initial concentrations than it does with reference concentrations derived from the arithmetic average of log-concentrations of boundary and initial waters.