Ground‐Water Contamination Due to Transient Sources of Pollution

Abstract

This paper presents simple analytical solutions to predict the temporal and spatial distribution of concentrations in one, two, or three‐dimensional fully saturated uniform flow fields caused by instantaneous or finite‐time release of contaminants from a point, line, plane, or parallelepiped source in an isotropic porous medium. The effects of the nonflux boundaries provided by bedrock, water table, or ground‐water divides are accounted for by the method of images. The same technique is used to model the contribution of a constant concentration boundary such as the one provided by a fully penetrating perennial stream. Sensitivity analyses show the effect of the number of images considered and the time‐step size used to evaluate the Duhamel integral. An example is presented to demonstrate the use of the method to analyze the distribution of concentrations due to seepage from an ashpond located in a streamaquifer system.