Modeling Electrokinetic-Soil Cleaning By Spatial Averaging

To predict the transport of ionic species into soils, such as in the acid mine drainages, a model will be implemented.  An anisotropic porous medium and application of external forces as electric potential will be used in a multi-scale modeling approach.  A minimum of key simplifications will be assumed, in order to capture the fundamental system behavior in model soils that mimic actual ones. Geometry of the control volume, medium properties, and intensity of electric potential constitute important variables to be considered. Since, the mass transport of the ionic species in soils takes place in a domain that displays different scales (molecular, microscopic, macroscopic and mesoscale), a multi-dimensional (spatial) averaging approach will be applied. Once, the spatial-averaged model become available, computational approaches will be used to illustrate the behavior of fundamental aspects. As a complementary part of this research, an experimental approach is being developed to guide and validate the predicted results.