Incorporation of aqueous reaction and sorption kinetics and biodegradation into TOUGHREACT

The needs for considering aqueous and sorption kinetics and microbiological processes arises in many subsurface problems, such as environmental and acid mine remediation. A general rate expression has been implemented into TOUGHREACT, which considers multiple mechanisms (pathways) and includes multiple product, Monod, and inhibition terms. In this paper, the formulation for incorporating kinetic rates among primary species into the mass balance equations is presented. A batch sulfide oxidation problem is simulated. The resulting concentrations are consistent with simple hand calculations. A 1-D reactive transport problem with kinetic biodegradation and sorption was investigated, which models the processes when a pulse of water containing NTA (nitrylotriacetate) and cobalt is injected into a column. The problem has several interacting chemical processes that are common to many environmental problems: biologically-mediated degradation of an organic substrate, bacterial cell growth and decay, metal sorption and aqueous speciation including metal-ligand complexation. The TOUGHREACT simulation results agree very well with those obtained with other simulators