Acoplamiento de modelos de transporte de solutos y de modelos de reacciones químicas

Abstract

During subsurface transport, reactive solutes are subject to a variety of hydrodynamic and chemical processes. The major hydrodynamic processes include advection and convection, dispersion and diffusion. The key chemical processes are complexation including hydrolysis and acid-base reactions, dissolution-precipitation, reduction-oxidation, adsorption and ion exchange. The combined effects of all these processes on solute transport must satisfy the principie of conservation of mass. The statement of conservation of mass for N mobile species leads to N partial differential equations. Traditional solute transport models often incorporate the effects of hydrodynamic processes rigorously but oversimplify chemical interactions among aqueous species. Sophisticated chemical equilibrium models, on the other hand, incorporate a variety of chemical processes but generally assume no-flow systems. In the past decade, coupled models accounting for complex hydrological and chemical processes, with varying degrees of sophistication, have been developed. The existing models of reactive transport employ two basic sets of equations. The transport of solutes is described by a set of partial differential equations, and the chemical processes, under the assumption of equilibrium, are described by a set of nonlinear algebraic equations. An important consideration in any approach is the choice of primary dependent variables. Most existing models cannot account for the complete set of chemical processes, cannot be easily extended to include mixed chemical equilibria and kinetics, and cannot handle practical two and three dimensional problems. The difficulties arise mainly from improper selection of the primary variables in the transport equations.