Thanks in no small part to the decades-long efforts of scientists like Jim Davis and his contemporaries, the community has made great strides in developing an understanding of not only the hydrologic and geochemical mechanisms governing the fate and transport of metals and inorganics in the environment, but also how to model those processes. With this understanding, we have learned that the controls on sorption-governed transport are many. The surface complexation modeling approach has proven a useful tool for capturing the geochemical controls on sorption process using the same thermodynamic concepts used for describing aqueous speciation reactions, and Jim Davis himself was among the first to attempt to extend these modeling approaches to complex and heterogeneous environmental systems.<br/>The coupling of geochemical processes to hydrologic descriptions of the fate and transport of solutes in aquifer systems remains a substantial challenge, particularly in “real world” systems outside of research-based field studies, such as mining and industrial sites with impacted groundwater. Even in cases where development of a numerical model for prediction of groundwater impacts is a high priority, the ability to obtain the types of hydrogeochemical information required for constraining such models is often either unavailable or technically infeasible. In these cases, it is very common to see application of geochemical thermodynamic models to describe the aqueous chemistry dynamics, but much less common to see them directly applied within large-scale solute transport models. Here, we discuss some of the challenges, practicalities, and possibilities in the advancement of rigorous geochemical modeling concepts (including surface complexation) in the development of flow and transport models for impacted sites. In particular, this presentation will provide the consulting geochemist’s perspective on how to leverage geochemical knowledge on sites where fully-coupled geochemical reactive transport models remain impractical.<br/>

Surface complexation and reactive transport modeling: An environmental consultant’s perspective

255th National Meeting (2018)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.