SIMPLIFIED APPROACH TO PARTICLE TRACKING METHODS FOR CONTAMINANT TRANSPORT

At issue is the common use of Gaussian distributed steps in producing the desired dispersive effects in contaminant transport modeling. Show n are alternative solutions to the governing transport equation descri bing mass displacements based on non-Gaussian, white (uncorrelated) in crements. In particular, the use of uniform distributed steps can be e mployed without loss of accuracy in the solution (over all Peclet numb ers) and may yield significant savings in the computational generation of the random deviates required in the Monte Carlo procedures of the random walk method. Although the results provided here are for one-dim ensional problems, the methodologies may be easily extended to higher- order domains yielding even more efficient computational solutions.