NUMERICAL CODE VALIDATION OF MULTI-PHASE FLOW CONDITIONS USING DATA FROM 2-D TANK EXPERIMENTS WITH NAPLS

R. Prucha¹, T.H. Illangasekare¹ and G. Zyvoloski²

¹Civil Engineering Department, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80303, 303-492-6644 and ²Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, 505-667-1581


ABSTRACT

Validation of a 3-D, finite clement, multi-phase code, FEHMN (Finite Element Heat and Mass Nuclear) developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory was performed. Results from an isothermal 2-D tank experiment involving the injection of a dense NAPL into an initially water-saturated, 3-layered heterogeneous porous medium were used for validation of the code. Quantitative data obtained during the experiment include saturation distributions within the 2-D tank at various times using a dual gamma system, injected mass of NAPL over time, and visual propagation of the NAPL front dyed red. Based on the results of the numerical simulations, additional, more focused 2-D tank experiments were proposed for further model validation. This validated model will be used in our future research efforts on up-scaling of multi-phase flow parameters to field problems.

KEY WORDS

multi-phase flow, NAPLs, numerical modeling

This paper is from the Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference on Hazardous Waste Research 1995, published in hard copy and on the Web by the Great Plains/Rocky Mountain Hazardous Substance Research Center.