Subsurface Flow Dynamics

Abstract

Transport models in the preceding chapters focused on contaminant, or solute, transport. We derived basic conservation laws that governed how the solutes were advected and dispersed throughout the medium, and we imposed relations that governed the kinetics of adsorption of those solutes. The subject of contaminant transport is just one aspect of porous media flow, and the development of the theory of these processes is fairly recent in the overall history of the study of ground water processes, beginning roughly in the last third of the twentieth century. Long before contaminants were of interest, researchers were interested in how the groundwater itself behaved as it seeped through porous structures. Questions involving water levels in wells, springs, and reservoirs, seepage through earthen dams, and the effects of pumping water out of wells occupied the early investigators, even back in the mid-nineteenth century.