Influence of physical and chemical aquifer heterogeneity on nitrate reduction processes by numerical simulations

Abstract:

Nitrate reduction reactions, as one of the most important redox reactions in a subsurface system, are strongly influenced by various heterogeneity factors which influence transport of chemical species and spatial distribution of redox substances and consequently have an effect on overall nitrate reduction capacity.

In this presented work, the influence of two heterogeneity factors, spatially heterogeneity of hydrological parameters versus spatial heterogeneity of geochemical reactive substances distribution, are discussed with a focus on nitrate transport and redox transformation processes. For this purpose, a coupling interface OGS#IPhreeqc is employed. This code combines Finite-Element groundwater flow and multi-species transport code of OpenGeoSys (OGS) with the IPhreeqc module of open source geochemical solver PHREEQC. The resulting coupled model is applied for simulation of nitrate reduction processes with a series of hypothetical aquifer systems, built using exponentially-correlated log-normal distributed hydraulic conductivity and reactive substances. The spatially heterogeneous aquifer system is realized by a RandomFields package using a statistical program R.

Results show that the heterogeneous hydraulics conductivity field has larger impact on nitrate reduction capacity than heterogeneous reactive substances distribution. Moreover, nitrate reduction capacity can be increased by enhanced mixing in heterogeneous hydraulic conductivity field however its overall reduction capacity has gradually decreased as a degree of heterogeneity has increased since accessibility of the chemical species by the reactive substances may be limited. These results support that appropriate characterization of the variance of hydraulic conductivity within the aquifer is important to predict contaminant fate and transport and quantify the impact of uncertainty on numerical groundwater simulation.