Simulation of biodegradable organic contaminants in groundwater: 1. Numerical formulation in principal directions

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Groundwater contamination by organic chemicals is of concern because of the widespread use of these compounds and because even low concentrations may be very harmful. Dissolved organic contaminants are affected by advection, dispersion, sorption, and biological transformations in groundwater systems; however, biological degradation by indigeneous bacterial populations is the only mechanism whereby contaminant mass can be naturally removed from an aquifer. The purpose of this study is to develop a physically and biochemically based numerical solution for the transport of biodegradable organic solutes with emphasis on an efficient numerical approach. A dual‐Monod relationship, combined with the advection‐dispersion equation, is used to represent the biological and physical processes affecting the organic solute, electron acceptor, and microbial population. The three resulting differential equations are nonlinearly coupled through the Monod decay terms. By employing an iterative principal direction finite‐element technique, efficiency is achieved by decoupling each of the two‐dimensional transport equations into a series of one‐dimensional equations. This decoupling should easily allow for extension of the model to three dimensions. An iterative solution is adopted because a purely sequential technique was observed to greatly underestimate the dissolved mass of an organic plume. Comparison of numerical results with the results of a laboratory column experiment shows that the model equations adequately describe the behavior of toluene, dissolved oxygen, and the bacterial population, without considering solute diffusion through stagnant fluid layers or biofilms. In a two‐dimensional shallow aquifer setting an organic plume experiences mass loss, spreading controlled by the availability of dissolved oxygen, and skewing in the direction of groundwater flow. These features would be lost if the interactions between the organic contaminant, electron acceptor, and microbial population were ignored in the mathematical formulation of the problem.