Smoothed particle hydrodynamics: Applications to migration of radionuclides in confined aqueous systems

Abstract

A smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model is presented for simulating the decay chain transport of radionuclides in confined aqueous solutions. The SPH formulation is based on the open-source parallel code DualSPHysics extended to solve the advective-diffusion equation for the evolution of the concentration field coupled to the fluid-dynamic equations, including the effects of radioactive decay of the tracer contaminants. The performance of the method is demonstrated for environmental engineering problems dealing with the transport of contaminants in still and flowing water. The results from a series of benchmark test calculations are described in two- and three-space dimensions, where the advection, diffusion, and radioactive decay modes are tested separately and in combined form. The accuracy of the present SPH transport model is shown by direct comparison with the analytical solutions and results from other SPH approaches. For a given problem, convergence of the SPH solution is seen to increase with decreasing particle size and spacing.