Peak Scaling of Breakthrough Curves in Reactive Flows

Abstract:

Solute transport in river and stream flows commonly exhibits power law tails due to retention in the sediment bed. Reactions in the sediment bed affect these tails, and their tempering provides information about the reaction rate. These effects are notoriously difficult to measure directly, due to the low concentrations present in the tails, which leads us to ask if other signatures of reactive anomalous transport can be sought. We adopt a stochastic transport framework to quantify the effect of sediment bed reactions on the peak of the breakthrough curves. This allows us to extract information about the bed reaction rates based on conservative and reactive peak values. We then validate our results in the context of a simple model that represents transport in an idealized river.