Inclusion of Some Aspects of Chemical Behavior of Unsaturated Soil in Thermo/Hydro/Chemical/Mechanical Models. I: Model Development

This paper presents an investigation of the inclusion of some aspects of chemical behavior within a model of coupled thermo/hydro/chemical/mechanical behavior of unsaturated soils. In particular, multicomponent reactive chemical transport behavior is addressed. The chemical transport model is based on the advection/dispersion/reaction equation, while geochemical reactions are considered via coupling with an established geochemical speciation model. A numerical solution of the governing differential equations is achieved by the use of the Galerkin-weighted residual method for spatial discretization and an implicit backward Eulerian finite-difference method for temporal discretization. The solution of the geochemical reactions is achieved externally to the main solution procedure. Coupling between the chemical transport and geochemical models is achieved via the implementation of both sequential iterative and sequential noniterative techniques. Three application problems are then presented to demonstrate the capability of the coupled model.