Back Diffusion from Thin Low Permeability Zones

Aquitards can serve as long-term contaminant sources to aquifers when contaminant mass diffuses from the aquitard following aquifer source mass depletion. This study describes analytical and experimental approaches to understand reactive and nonreactive solute transport in a thin aquitard bounded by an adjacent aquifer. A series of well-controlled laboratory experiments were conducted in a two-dimensional flow chamber to quantify solute diffusion from a high-permeability sand into and subsequently out of kaolinite clay layers of vertical thickness 15 mm, 20 mm, and 60 mm. One-dimensional analytical solutions were developed for diffusion in a finite aquitard with mass exchange with an adjacent aquifer using the method of images. The analytical solutions showed very good agreement with measured breakthrough curves and aquitard concentration distributions measured in situ by light reflection visualization. Solutes with low retardation accumulated more stored mass with greater penetration distance in the aquitard compared to high-retardation solutes. However, because the duration of aquitard mass release was much longer, high-retardation solutes have a greater long-term back diffusion risk. The error associated with applying a semi-infinite domain analytical solution to a finite diffusion domain increases as a function of the system relative diffusion length scale, suggesting that the solutions using image sources should be applied in cases with rapid solute diffusion and/or thin clay layers. The solutions presented here can be extended to multilayer aquifer/low-permeability systems to assess the significance of back diffusion from thin layers.