▶ Date: 2022. 10. 06(THU)

▶ Time: 4:30 ~ 5:30PM

▶ Venue : Research Building I, #310 / Offline

▶ Speaker: Dr. Heewon Jung(Chungnam National University)

▶ Title: Upscaling biogeochemical processes in reactive transport models

▶ Abstract:

Predicting the biogeochemical response in soils and aquatic sediments to changes in environmental conditions requires a quantitative understanding of how they influence the spatial and temporal distribution of flow and reaction characteristics. Reactive transport models, which mathematically integrate physical, chemical, and biological processes, have been serving as a powerful tool to explore the complex interactions between coupled elemental cycles. One of the biggest challenges of this approach is posed by the highly heterogeneous nature of geologic media from the pore-scale to field scale. To accurately estimate and predict biogeochemical processes, numerical models need to resolve the critical scales for fluid flow and substrate distributions. However, accounting for small-scale features is often practically infeasible especially for large-scale hydrologic systems, such as watersheds, wetlands, and marine sediments. This practical limitation gives rise to the necessity for upscaling small-scale features to macroscopic model parameters. In addition, microbial dynamics are often over-simplified in numerical models limiting the quantitative estimation of complex subsurface system behaviors. In this presentation, I explore the effect of spatial heterogeneity of porous media on macroscopic biogeochemical parameters and a novel approach incorporating microbial metabolisms in reactive transport models.