Analysis of Virus Transport in Groundwater and Identification of Transport Parameters

Abstract

The present study deals with the analysis of virus transport in groundwater and estimation of transport parameters. The parameter estimation is formulated as a least-squares minimization problem in which the parameters are estimated by minimizing the deviations between the model predicted and experimentally observed virus concentrations. A parameter estimation procedure is developed by coupling a hybrid finite volume numerical model simulating one-dimensional virus transport with the Levenberg-Marquadart algorithm. The numerical model employs a globally second order accurate explicit finite volume method for the advective transport and an implicit finite difference method for the dispersive transport. The comparison of model prediction with analytical solution shows that the numerical model accurately predicts virus movement in both advective and dispersive dominated transport. The parameter estimation indicates that for the case of estimating more than three unknown parameters, the inverse procedure resu...