Movement of Contaminants through Kaolin Clay: A Numerical Approach

Understanding the fate and movement of contaminants through soil is essential in applications such as ecological and environmental risk assessment. Abundance of clayey soil is available across the world. Presented in this paper is a parametric study of the movement of contaminants through clays. The current paper provides a holistic approach addressing these issues by providing an understanding of the factors influencing movement of contaminants in soil strata using available numerical models (advection and dispersion) for contaminant flow through porous medium. A numerical model using the finite difference and finite element method is considered in this study to estimate the contaminant transport phenomenon presented by Zhao et al. (1994) that utilises the analytical solution proposed by Ogata and Banks (1961). The results and discussions of the parametric study highlight the influence of various properties of soil and the contaminant on permeability and concentration (contaminant) variation with time and depth. The finding indicates that the diffusion coefficient (Dx) plays an important role in determining the time taken for the concentration of contaminants to be evenly spread in a vertical direction.