Contaminant transport in a two-zone wetland: Dispersion and ecological degradation

SummaryUnderstanding the fate of contaminant in wetland flows is essential in applications such as ecological risk assessment and environmental hydraulic design. Presented in this paper is an analytical study on the dispersion of contaminant in a two-zone wetland, with the effect of ecological degradation taken into consideration. Environmental dispersion is discussed separately via an exponential transformation for the general formulation of contaminant transport. Taylor’s classical analysis for solute dispersion in a long and thin tube flow is rigorously generalized for the dispersion of the lateral mean contaminant concentration in the longitudinal direction. A method of asymptotic analysis is adopted instead of the concentration moment method in order to simplify the process of deduction and the expression of the analytical solution. Gill’s method of mean concentration expansion is applied to model the concentration deviation terms produced in an averaging operation. With the velocity profile obtained previously, the enhancement of the environmental dispersivity under long time evolution is determined and shown to be consistent with that obtained by the method of concentration moment. Analytical solutions for the evolution of the contaminant concentration and the influenced region of the contaminant cloud are obtained by combining both the hydraulic and the ecological effects. For typical pollutant as the heavy metal Hg, the evolution of contaminant cloud is illustrated by critical length and duration in an application with concentration beyond some given environmental standard level. Results show that for wetland flows with a two-zone structure, the influenced region is reduced evidently while the duration of the contaminant cloud remains nearly unchanged, compared with that for the single-zone wetland flow.

► Environmental dispersion is formulated with ecological effect considered.
► Analytical solution for the concentration evolution is obtained.
► The evolution of the critical length is illustrated in an application.