[1] The physics regarding the retention and mobilization of colloids in saturated and unsaturated conditions remains poorly understood, partially because of the inability to measure colloid concentrations in situ. In this study, we attached Cd ions to clay colloids and used synchrotron X rays to cause the Cd to fluoresce. By measuring the fluorescence and attenuation of the X rays we obtained s...

The nonlinear solvers in numerical solution of water flow in variably saturated soils are prone to convergence difficulties. Many aspects can give rise to such difficulties, like very dry initial conditions, a steep pressure gradient and great variation of hydraulic conductivity occur across the wetting front during the infiltration of water.  So, the averaging method applied to compute hydraul...

Biodiesel is an attractive renewable energy source, which is suitable as a substitute to the non-renewable petroleum diesel. However, it is plagued by its relatively bad cold flow behaviour. In this review, the factors affecting the cold flow of biodiesel, vis-à-vis the contradicting requirement of good cold flow and good ignition properties, are discussed. Fuel filter plugging, and crystalliza...

Hillslopes have complex three-dimensional shapes that are characterized by their plan shape, profile curvature of surface and bedrock, and soil depth. To investigate the stability of complex hillslopes (with different slope curvatures and plan shapes), we combine the hillslopestorage Boussinesq (HSB) model with the infinite slope stability method. The HSB model is based on the continuity and Da...

Even with the continual advances made in both computational algorithms and computer hardware used in reservoir modeling studies, large-scale simulation of fluid and heat flow in heterogeneous reservoirs remains a challenge. The problem commonly arises from intensive computational requirement for detailed modeling investigations of real-world reservoirs. This paper presents the application of a ...

A three-dimensional unsaturated-zone numerical model has been developed to simulate flow and distribution of moisture, gas and heat at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, a potential repository site for high-level radioactive waste. The model takes into account the simultaneous flow dynamics of liquid water, vapor, air and heat in the highly heterogeneous, fractured porous rock in the Ž . unsaturated zone ...

This paper presents an efficient massively parallel scheme for modeling large-scale multiphase flow, multicomponent transport and heat transfer in porous and fractured reservoirs. The new scheme is implemented into a parallel version of the TOUGH2 code and the numerical performance is tested on a Cray T3E-900 (a distributed-memory parallel computer with 692 processors) and IBM RS/6000 SP (a dis...

Introduction The development and application of ground-water models has been an important component of USGS hydrologic investigations since the early 1970s. During the past 35 years, the USGS has developed a wide range of computer models to simulate saturated and unsaturated subsurface flow, solute transport, and chemical reactions. The most widely used of these programs is the MODFLOW model, w...