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

- We analytically explored the contaminant dispersion in three-zone wetland flows.
- Flows with usually high Péclet numbers in practice were considered.
- The ecological degradation was also taken into account.
- The environmental dispersivity was simply determined by asymptotic analysis.
- We illustrated evolution of the lateral mean concentration and critical length.

SummaryTo further understand the fate of contaminant transport in real waterways interacting with riparian buffers and adjacent aquatic vegetation, solute dispersion is analytically explored for three-zone wetland flows with usually high Péclet number in this paper. Ecological effects are also taken into account. Environmental dispersion is addressed independently via an exponential transformation of the basic formulation of mass transfer in the context of porous media flow. After rigorously generalizing Taylor's classical analysis, asymptotic analysis was used instead of the method of concentration moment or multi-scale analysis to simplify the examination. The mean concentration expansion base in Gill's method is adopted to model concentration deviations produced in the lateral-average operation. With a previously derived velocity profile, environmental dispersivity is obtained, effectively illustrating the effects of critical dimensionless parameters. Analytical expressions for evolution of the lateral mean concentration and critical length of the contaminant cloud are determined by combining the effects of both hydraulic dispersion and ecological degradation. An application example is provided to illustrate the evolution of contaminant cloud in terms of the critical length and duration with concentration greater than a given environmental standard level. Results show that for three-zone wetlands, the duration is clearly increased while the region affected by the contaminant cloud is slightly smaller than that for two-zone wetland flows.