Impacts of the spatial variation of hydraulic conductivity on the transport fate of contaminant plume

Compared with commonly used deterministic methods,the stochastic hydrogeology method is a more rational resort for solving the flow and transport problems in the heterogeneous aquifers. On the assumption that the hydraulic conductivity field follows a lognormal distribution,the direct Fourier transform is introduced to generate multiple realizations of hydraulic conductivity field. Then the Monte Carlo method,based on the stochastic theory,is applied to investigate the effect of the spatial variation of hydraulic conductivity on the fate of contaminant plume. For the contaminant plume examined in this synthetic example study the spatial second moments defining the spread of the contaminant plume around its centroid increase with the enlargement of the variance of hydraulic conductivity distribution,while the first moment specifying the centroid of the plume is not influenced by the variance of hydraulic conductivity but dominated by the mean of hydraulic conductivity. Additional analysis demonstrates the sensitivity of both variance and coefficient of variation of plume concentration to the various variances of hydraulic conductivity field.