NUMERICAL MODELING OF TRANSIENT CONTAMINANT MIGRATION PROBLEMS IN INFINITE POROUS FRACTURED MEDIA USING FINITE INFINITE ELEMENT TECHNIQUE .1. THEORY

The leakage effect in porous fissured media has been considered in a general sense by introducing a new expression of the leakage term in this paper. The double porosity concept is employed and the related expressions are formulated using the upwind finite element approach. Considering the infinite extension of the problem domain, a mapped transient infinite element has been presented to simulate the far field of the infinite medium. Since the mass transfer function of the present mapped transient infinite element is dependent on both space and time variables, the mechanism of transient contaminant migration problems in infinite porous fractured media can be rigorously simulated because the property matrices of the element are evaluated at any time of interest. By comparing the current numerical results with the analytical ones, the accuracy, correctness and effectiveness of the present method have been established. Three different time discretization schemes were examined and it was found that either the central difference or the backward difference approximation is suitable for the upwind finite element simulation of transient contaminant migration problems.