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Upscaling of solute transport in mildly heterogeneous media: comparison of Fickian and non-Fickian approaches

CHRISTOPHE C. FRIPPIAT & ALAIN E. HOLEYMAN

Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Université catholique de Louvain,
Place du Levant 1, Bâtiment Vinci, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

holeyman@gce.ucl.ac.be

Abstract Non-Fickian solute transport models were investigated in the case of mildly heterogeneous porous media using a synthetic two-dimensional ln(K) field, generated randomly. Transport was fully solved using MT3D and exhibited scale-dependence. Monte Carlo simulations were used to quantify uncertainty in the absence of a priori data. Then, inverse and direct modelling using the continuous time random walk approach and the fractional advection–dispersion equation were performed in order to assess the upscaling capacities of these models. A sensitive improvement could be observed compared to the classical advection–dispersion model.

Keywords CTRW; FADE; non-Fickian transport; stochastic; synthetic example