A Hybrid Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics - Streamline Method to Simulate Solute Transport in Heterogeneous Porous Media

The numerical simulation of solute transport in heterogeneous porous media due to advection and dispersion presents formidable challenges for traditional numerical techniques. We present a numerical technique based on a Lagrangian approach to simulate conservative solute transport in heterogeneous geological formations. The method combines elements of smoothed particle hydrodynamics and streamline based methods to cope with dispersive and advective solute transport processes, respectively. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method versus other popular numerical methods for the simulation of solute transport in heterogeneous porous media under different Péclet numbers. The results of our simulations demonstrate that the proposed method has important advantages over other standard methods because of its natural ability to control numerical dispersion. While the numerical dispersion affecting traditional numerical methods creates artificial mixing and dilution, the new scheme provides numerical solutions that are physically correct, greatly reducing these artifacts. Finally, we demonstrate that the new proposed scheme is stable and conserves solute mass.