NONLOCAL REACTIVE TRANSPORT WITH PHYSICAL AND CHEMICAL HETEROGENEITY - LOCALIZATION ERRORS

The origin of nonlocality in ''macroscale'' models for subsurface chemical transport is illustrated. It is argued that media that are either nonperiodic (e.g., media with evolving heterogeneity) or periodic viewed on a scale wherein a unit cell is discernible must display some nonlocality in the mean. A metaphysical argument suggests that owing to the scarcity of information on natural scales of heterogeneity and on scales of observation associated with an instrument window, constitutive theories for the mean concentration should at the outset of any modeling effort always be considered nonlocal. The intuitive appeal to nonlocality is reinforced with an analytical derivation of the constitutive theory for a conservative tracer without appeal to any mathematical approximations. Deng et al. (1993) present a first-order, nonlocal, Eulerian theory for transport of a conservative solute in an infinite nondeforming domain under steady flow conditions. Hu et al. (this issue) extended these results to account for nonequilibrium linear sorption with random partition coefficient K-d but deterministic constant reaction rate K-r. These theories are localized herein, and comparisons are made between the fully nonlocal (FNL), nonlocal in time (NLT), and fully localized (FL) theories. For conservative transport, there is little difference between the first-order FL and FNL models for spatial moments up to and including the third. However, for conservative transport the first-order NLT model differs significantly from the FNL model in the third spatial moments. For reactive transport, all spatial moments differ between the FNL and FL models. The second transverse-horizontal and third longitudinal-horizontal moments for the NLT model differ from the FNL model. These results suggest that localized first-order transport models for conservative tracers are reasonable if only lower-order moments are desired. However, when the chemical reacts with its environment, the localization approximation can lead to significant error in all moments, and a FNL model will in general be required for accurate simulation.