Environmental Remediation
Dr. Steven Bryant and Joe Eaton
Center for Subsurface Modeling

Quicktime movie (2 MB)

This simulation models one method of downstream pollution control for a contaminated mass of soil in a saturated porous media. The colored plumes represent dissolved contaminants in the water table. In this model, naturally occurring degradation of the contaminant is accelerated by injecting an oxidizing agent upstream. This oxidizer reacts with reducing mineral agents in the soil as well as producing the desired effect. When compared to models which assume a passive media, this model reveals that remediation may be retarded by several years beyond the time predicted by a more naive model. This effect can only be captured by coupled geological flow simulations and chemical reaction models, such as those developed in the Center for Subsurface Modeling at TICAM.

Professor Mary Wheeler heads the Center for Subsurface Modeling at the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics. Computational results courtesy Dr. Steven Bryant and Joe Eaton.