Permeable Reactive Barriers (Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Belfast, Northern Ireland, March 2004). IAHS Publ. 298, 2005, 136-143.

Abstract Groundwater flow through permeable reactive barriers (PRBs) may often involve coupled free (non-porous) and porous sections. To model the fluid mobility efficiently in such situations and design an effective subsurface remediation scheme, the free and porous flow zones should be studied in conjunction with each other. The flow phenomena in the conjugate regions must also be upscaled from the local to larger scales (e.g. field scale). The present paper focuses on analysing the hydrodynamic conditions in combined free and porous domains in an aid for designing PRBs. The paper does not address the issues related to upscaling the flow processes to a larger scale.

Key words Beavers & Joseph (1967) formulation; combined free and porous flow; Darcy equation; Navier–Stokes equations; permeable reactive barrier