Coupled microbial and geochemical reactive transport models in prous mediaformulation and application to synthetic and "in situ" experiments
- Samper, Javier
- Zhang, Guoxiang
- Montenegro, Luís
ISSN: 1886-7995, 1698-6180
Year of publication: 2006
Issue Title: Research and Development for the Deep Geological Disposal of Radioactive Wastes (II)
Volume: 32
Issue: 2
Pages: 215-232
Type: Article
More publications in: Journal of iberian geology: an international publication of earth sciences
Abstract
The study of natural groundwater chemistry and contamination as well as the safety assessment of underground disposal facilities for radioactive waste require the use of models which are able to consider simultaneously groundwater flow, heat transfer, solute transport, geochemical reactions and microbiological processes. This paper presents a mathematical and numerical formulation of coupled water flow and microbial reactive transport in porous media which has been implemented in a coupled biogeochemical reactive transport code, BIO-CORE2D© by adding microbiological processes into a nonisothermal reactive transport code, CORE2D©. BIO-CORE2D© incorporates efficient numerical algorithms such as a first-order unconditionally-stable implicit version of the sequential iteration approach and a sophisticated automatic time stepping algorithm which optimizes the size of the time step. Hydrobiogeochemical models are illustrated with a synthetic example and the CERBERUS experiment performed at the Mol underground research laboratory in Belgium to evaluate the effect of heat and radiation on Boom clay.