Anyone working on contaminant transport modeling/inversion?

Hello everyone, my name is John Stults, and I am a PhD candidate at the Colorado School of Mines. I am working on contaminant transport problems related to PFASs. I have developed several inverse parameter estimators in python for 1-D transport of PFASs in unsaturated flow columns.

So far, codes I have written are limited to primarily steady state unsatureated flow conditions and the 1-D domain. These have worked well for laboratory experiments, but I am looking to scale these models into 2-D/3-D domains and incorporate Richards/Darcy equations of unsteady flow systems.

I saw some talks on SimPEG at AGU this year and thought it might be worthwhile to contribute to this larger project rather than build these models form scratch. If there is anyone here who is working on contaminant transport problems in unsaturated/saturated groundwater and would like to collaborate please let me know!

Hi John, welcome to the SimPEG community! :slight_smile:

My PhD was in Richards flow - doing some large scale inversions of Richards equation. PhD thesis is here (https://row1.ca/phd-thesis) if you want to take a glance through some of what I worked on. I worked on the Richards equation research with Lindsey.

SimPEG has Richards equation/inversion working, as well as some utilities around Van Genukten parameterizations etc. that are helpful. I never got around to integrating with Darcy, but do know that simpeg has all of the capabilities to do that (and that application would be very exciting).

I also think that Seogi is working on some groundwater flow equation stuff as well!

Hey Rowan, thanks for the reply! That’s great to hear. I’ll take a look at your thesis as I start to get more involved here.

I am really interested in coupling contaminant transport equations with groundwater flow and Richards equations for my research . We are also developing some new formulations of traditional contaminant transport equations that we would like to test through inversion of experimental data.

It sounds like I might be the first person here to be interested in working with coupling groundwater flow/Richards with mass transport equations for SimPEG. Is that accurate?

If so I’d be happy to take up the mantle of working out some of the Darcy and transport equations for with SimPEG. I already have some python programs written specifically for handling non-equlibrium transport for 1-D systems.