Groundwater and solute transport modelling study Vosdonk Noord at Etten-Leur

Abstract

The industrial site of Vosdonk Noord at Etten-Leur in the Netherlands consists of a large soil contamination in combination with highly heterogenic shallow subsurface soil characteristics. In this report, we study the groundwater flow and solute transport behaviour at this project location. Throughout this process, knowledge is gathered about the interpretation of the shallow subsurface heterogeneity with a main focus on the hydraulic conductivities. It is interesting to look at the subsurface heterogeneity because of the challenge to implement it inside a model and its uncertainty in characteristics. This means the subsurface heterogeneity is part of the problem to be solved. A comparison of groundwater flow and solute transport results were made using kriging as an interpolation method to implement subsurface cone penetration test data directly into the model. This generated a cell by cell implementation of the subsurface characteristics. To include the possible variability of the subsurface and to increase the reliability of the results, random simulations were implemented. In practice, the “pancake” method characterises the subsurface in a commercial software like Visual Modflow. This “pancake” method uses continuous horizontal subsurface soil layers. The gathered knowledge is useful to try and tackle the in practice used “pancake” method in case of a highly heterogenic subsurface.