ANALYTICAL SOLUTIONS FOR TRANSPORT OF LINEARLY ADSORBING SOLUTES IN HETEROGENEOUS FORMATIONS

A new first-order analytical solution for stochastic transport of reac tive solutes in physically and chemically heterogeneous porous formati ons is derived and discussed. Physical and chemical heterogeneities ar e assumed partially correlated. The derived solution complements previ ous results obtained by the authors (Bellin et al., 1993). The solutio n proposed relies on the assumption of chemical activity described by the local linear equilibrium assumption postulating the existence of a (spatially variable) retardation factor. Retardation factors, R(x) an d log permeabilities (Y(x)) modeling heterogeneities are described sta tistically by random space functions with assigned correlation structu re. The analytical expressions derived reduce to Dagan's (1984) classi c solution for the case of nonreactive solute transport and to Bellin et al.'s (1993) solutions for perfectly correlated physical and chemic al heterogeneities. The main conclusion is that longitudinal dispersio n may be significantly affected by different degrees of correlation be tween chemical and physical heterogeneities. However, such an impact v anishes progressively as the geometric mean of the partition coefficie nt increases and the plume behaves as in perfectly correlated cases. T ransverse dispersion is not affected by either perfect or partial corr elation between R and Y.