Abstract
Abstract. The model of single-well push–pull (SWPP) test has been widely used to
investigate reactive radial dispersion in remediation or parameter
estimation of in situ aquifers. Previous analytical solutions only focused on a
completely isolated aquifer for the SWPP test, excluding any influence of
aquitards bounding the tested aquifer, and ignored the wellbore storage of
the chaser and rest phases in the SWPP test. Such simplification might be
questionable in field applications when test durations are relatively long because solute transport in or out of the bounding aquitards is inevitable
due to molecular diffusion and cross-formational advective transport. Here,
a new SWPP model is developed in an aquifer–aquitard system with wellbore
storage, and the analytical solution in the Laplace domain is derived. Four
phases of the test are included: the injection phase, the chaser phase, the
rest phase and the extraction phase. As the permeability of the aquitard is much
smaller than the permeability of the aquifer, the flow is assumed to be
perpendicular to the aquitard; thus only vertical dispersive and advective
transports are considered for the aquitard. The validity of this treatment is
tested against results grounded in numerical simulations. The global
sensitivity analysis indicates that the results of the SWPP test are largely
sensitive (i.e., influenced by) to the parameters of porosity and radial
dispersion of the aquifer, whereas the influence of the aquitard on results could
not be ignored. In the injection phase, the larger radial dispersivity of
the aquifer could result in the smaller values of breakthrough curves
(BTCs), while there are greater BTC values in the chaser and rest phases. In the
extraction phase, it could lead to the smaller peak values of BTCs. The new
model of this study is a generalization of several previous studies, and it
performs better than previous studies ignoring the aquitard effect and
wellbore storage for interpreting data of the field SWPP test reported by
Yang et al. (2014).
Funder
Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
China Geological Survey
Subject
General Earth and Planetary Sciences,General Engineering,General Environmental Science
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