• Journal of Korea Soil Environment Society
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.81-94
• /
• 1997

In many solute transport studies, either flux or resident concentration has been used. Choice of the concentration mode was dependent on the monitoring device in solute displacement experiments. It has been accepted that no priority exists in the selection of concentration mode in the study of solute transport. It would be questionable, however, to accept the equivalency in the solute transport parameters between flux and resident concentrations in structured soils exhibiting preferential movement of solute. In this study, we investigate how they differ in the monitored breakthrough curves (BTCs) and transport parameters for a given boundary and flow condition by performing solute displacement experiments on a number of undisturbed soil columns. Both flux and resident concentrations have been simultaneously obtained by monitoring the effluent and resistance of the horizontally-positioned TDR probes. Two different solute transport models namely, convection-dispersion equation (CDE) and convective lognormal transfer function (CLT) models, were fitted to the observed breakthrough data in order to quantify the difference between two concentration modes. The study reveals that soil columns having relatively high flux densities exhibited great differences in the degree of peak concentration and travel time of peak between flux and resident concentrations. The peak concentration in flux mode was several times higher than that in resident one. Accordingly, the estimated parameters of flux mode differed greatly from those of resident mode and the difference was more pronounced in CDE than CLT model. Especially in CDE model, the parameters of flux mode were much higher than those of resident mode. This was mainly due to the bypassing of solute through soil macropores and failure of the equilibrium CDE model to adequate description of solute transport in studied soils. In the domain of the relationship between the ratio of hydrodynamic dispersion to molecular diffusion and the peclet number, both concentrations fall on a zone of predominant mechanical dispersion. However, it appears that more molecular diffusion contributes to the solute spreading in the matrix region than the macropore region due to the nonliearity present in the pore water velocity and dispersion coefficient relationship.