Reactive transport in open-channel flows with bed adsorption and desorption

Abstract

Researches on the solute dispersion with boundary adsorption and desorption are common in various fields, such as chemistry, biology, and hydraulics. However, the Laplace transform, as a method available for the transient transport with coupled processes of adsorption–desorption at boundaries, is complicated to apply. Recently, Jiang et al. (2022) proposed a much simpler analytical method by extending the classic framework of separation of variables to derive solutions of concentration moments for tube flows, which is valid for the entire range of the reactive transport process. Here we apply this simple approach to solute transport in open-channel flows with bed adsorption and desorption. We obtain analytical solutions capturing exactly the transient statistics for the solute cloud as compared to the numerical simulations, regarding the variation of the cloud mass, the motions of the centroid of the cloud, and the scattering of the cloud, respectively. We further investigate the effect of adsorption–desorption on the dispersion process and the influence of initial conditions on the non-uniformity of dispersion characteristics over the cross-section before the Taylor dispersion regime. Through comparisons with that of tube flows, we find that the distribution of solute mass, the drift, and the dispersivity for open channel flows change more slowly with time and the response time is longer.