Benchmarking reactive transport models at a hillslope scale

Abstract:

The hillslope scale is an important transition between the field scale and the catchment scale. The water flow in the unsaturated zone of a hillslope can be highly dynamic, which can lead to dynamic changes of groundwater flow or stream outflow. Additionally, interactions among host rock formation, soil properties and recharge water from precipitation or anthropogenic activities (mining, agriculture etc.) can influence the water quality of groundwater and stream in the long term. To simulate reactive transport processes at such a scale is a challenging task. On the one hand, simulation of water flow in a coupled soil-aquifer system often involves solving of highly non-linear PDEs such as Richards equation; on the other hand, one has to consider complicated biogeochemical reactions (e.g. water-rock interactions, biological degradation, redox reactions). Both aspects are computationally expensive and have high requirements on the numerical precision and stabilities of the employed code.

The primary goals of this study are as follows: i) Identify the bottlenecks and quantitatively analyse their influence on simulation of biogeochemical reactions at a hillslope scale; ii) find or suggest practical strategies to deal with these bottlenecks, thus to provide detailed hints for future improvements of reactive transport simulators. To achieve these goals, the parallelized reactive transport simulator OGS#IPhreeqc has been applied to simulate two benchmark examples. The first example is about uranium leaching based on Šimůnek et al. (2012), which considers the leaching of uranium from a mill tailing and accompanied mineral dissolution/precipitation. The geochemical system is then extended to include redox reactions in the second example. Based on these examples, the numerical stability and parallel performance of the tool is analysed.

Reference

Šimůnek, J., Jacques, D., Šejna, M., van Genuchten, M. T.: The HP2 program for HYDRUS (2D/3D), A coupled code for simulating two-dimensional variably saturated water flow, heat transport, solute transport and biogeochemistry in porous media (HYDRUS+PHREEQC+2D), available at: http://www.pc-progress.com/Documents/HYDRUS3D_HP2_Manual.pdf, last access: 9 April 2015.