Géosciences Rennes, University of Rennes
co-supervisors: T. Le Borgne, J-R De Dreuzy, P. Davy, O. Bour
The fate of contaminants in the subsurface is of major importance both for the management of groundwater and for the management of waste disposals. Even when the chemical reactivity has been well-identified, modelling and predicting it at site scale remains a challenging task. The reactivity obtained in well-mixed batch reactor cannot be extrapolated to field conditions where different mixing mechanisms prevail. The objective of the PhD project is to understand how the geological heterogeneity and its induced flow structures amplify mixing to mediate the chemical reactivity.
The PhD project will start on the basis of the important progresses done recently with the development of methods for quantifying the influence of the spatial organization of the flow field on the dispersion and mixing properties and reaction rates (Le Borgne et al., 2007. Dentz et al., 2008, De simoni et al., 2007).
The project will be based on numerical experiments and theoretical developments in close collaboration with partners at Barcelona, Milano and Israel. It will beneficiate from the recent development of a collaborative numerical platform for modelling flow and transport in geological media (see website http://hydrolab.irisa.fr/). This PhD project could lead to a new modelling methodologies for a better prediction of contamination fates in highly heterogeneous and fractured media. Application to field sites like those of the Research Observatory H+ and practical developments as well as close contacts with the geotechnical company ITASCA will be highly encouraged.
The PhD student will be based at the Géosciences Rennes group in Britanny, France. The successfull candidate will also have the opportunity to perform training periods at partners at Barcelona, Milan, Weizmann institute (Israel), Leeds, Edinburgh and geological survey of Norway.
Funding Notes
The thesis will be funded for three years under a Marie Curie training network IMVUL, which is aimed at training researchers in the major issues and processes relevant to groundwater vulnerability. We are seeking a student with a background in physics, earth sciences or engineering. More details are available on the following website: http://hplus.ore.fr/index.php?lang=en&id_article=98&
* De Simoni M., X. Sanchez-Vila, J. Carrera, M. W. Saaltink (2007), A mixing ratios-based formulation for multicomponent reactive transport, Water Resour. Res., 43, W07419, doi:10.1029/2006WR005256.
* Le Borgne T., J.-R. de Dreuzy, P. Davy, and O. Bour (2007), Characterization of the velocity field organization in heterogeneous media by conditional correlation, Water Resour. Res., 43, W02419, doi:10.1029/2006WR004875.
* M. Dentz, T. Le Borgne, J. Carrera. Effective transport in random shear flows. Physical Review E, 77, 020101 (R) (2008).
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