Quantification of Lagrangian travel time statistics under nonstationary random groundwater flow conditions

Abstract

This study presents a Lagrangian description of advection dominated field-scale transport of inert solutes, namely, the statistics of advective solute travel time and trajectory, in nonstationary random groundwater flow fields. The vertical flow field is generated by the effects of changes in total stress applied in fluid-saturated heterogeneous deformable porous media. The Lagrangian statistics are developed directly from the velocity statistics based on the application of stochastic methodology such as the representation theorem and Fourier-Stieltjes integral representation. The focus of our numerical evaluation is placed on the influence of the soil compressibility on the Lagrangian statistics. The prediction on the statistics of solute travel time and trajectory may serve as the basic input to the environmental risk assessment. KEYWORDS heterogeneous deformable porous media, nonstationary groundwater flow fields, soil compressibility, statistics of the solute travel time