The Water Panel is pleased to announce that it is co-hosting this year’s Birdsall Dreiss Lecture with the IAH. This year’s lecture is titled: Understanding Solute Transport in Extremely Heterogenous Porous Media and will be given by Dr. Chunmiao Zheng, Professor of hydrogeology at University of Alabama. The presentation will be given on Wednesday 11th November 2009, 6 to 8 pm, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway Campus, Tower Building (CB02), 15 Broadway Street Level 4 (Tower entrance level), Room 411 (CB02.04.11) – see map on our events page.
Drinks and nibbles will be available
The abstract for the presentation, which is available on the information flier, is:
Field studies at well-instrumented sites have played a pre-eminent role in our efforts to better understand and predict contaminant transport in geologic media. In particular, field tracer tests have provided new insights and extensive data sets essential to development and testing of transport theories and mathematical models. In addition to the investigation at field site at the Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi, much recent research on contaminant transport in heterogeneous media has been motivated by findings at the MADE site. In particular, results from field investigations have suggested the existence of small- scale preferential flow paths and relative flow barriers, which together exert a dominating control on contaminant transport and remediation. This presentation will provide an overview of the field campaigns at the MADE site over the past 25 years and discuss how the findings from these field studies have inspired various theories and models to accommodate the non-ideal transport observed in the field. The MADE site has proven to be a valuable natural observatory where continuing research efforts will lead to a stronger theoretical framework and practical tools for modelling solute transport and evaluating remedial measures in extremely heterogeneous aquifers.
