Simplified Approach to Particle Tracking Methods for Contaminant Transport

Abstract

At issue is the common use of Gaussian distributed steps in producing the desired dispersive effects in contaminant transport modeling. Shown are alternative solutions to the governing transport equation describing mass displacements based on non-Gaussian, white (uncorrelated) increments. In particular, the use of uniform distributed steps can be employed without loss of accuracy in the solution (over all Péclet numbers) and may yield significant savings in the computational generation of the random deviates required in the Monte Carlo procedures of the random walk method. Although the results provided here are for one-dimensional problems, the methodologies may be easily extended to higher-order domains yielding even more efficient computational solutions.