N. Woodman

Extreme hydrothermal conditions at an active plate-bounding fault

Temperature and fluid pressure conditions control rock deformation and mineralization on geological faults, and hence the distribution of earthquakes. Typical intraplate continental crust has hydrostatic fluid pressure and a near-surface thermal gradient of 31 ± 15 degrees Celsius per kilometre. At temperatures above 300–450 degrees Celsius, usually found at depths greater than 10–15 kilometres, the intra-crystalline plasticity of quartz and feldspar relieves stress by aseismic creep and earthquakes are infrequent. Hydrothermal conditions control the stability of mineral phases and hence frictional–mechanical processes associated with earthquake rupture cycles, but there are few temperature and fluid pressure data from active plate-bounding faults. Here we report results from a borehole drilled into the upper part of the Alpine Fault, which is late in its cycle of stress accumulation and expected to rupture in a magnitude 8 earthquake in the coming decades. The borehole (depth 893 metres) revealed a pore fluid pressure gradient exceeding 9 ± 1 per cent above hydrostatic levels and an average geothermal gradient of 125 ± 55 degrees Celsius per kilometre within the hanging wall of the fault. These extreme hydrothermal conditions result from rapid fault movement, which transports rock and heat from depth, and topographically driven fluid movement that concentrates heat into valleys. Shear heating may occur within the fault but is not required to explain our observations. Our data and models show that highly anomalous fluid pressure and temperature gradients in the upper part of the seismogenic zone can be created by positive feedbacks between processes of fault slip, rock fracturing and alteration, and landscape development at plate-bounding faults.

Multiple-tracer tests for contaminant transport process identification in saturated municipal solid waste

Two column tests were performed in conditions emulating vertical flow beneath the leachate table in a biologically active landfill to determine dominant transport mechanisms occurring in landfills. An improved understanding of contaminant transport process in wastes is required for developing better predictions about potential length of the long term aftercare of landfills, currently measured in timescales of centuries. Three tracers (lithium, bromide and deuterium) were used. Lithium did not behave conservatively. Given that lithium has been used extensively for tracing in landfill wastes, the tracer itself and the findings of previous tests which assume that it has behaved conservatively may need revisiting. The smaller column test could not be fitted with continuum models, probably because the volume of waste was below a representative elemental volume. Modelling compared advection-dispersion (AD), dual porosity (DP) and hybrid AD-DP models. Of these models, the DP model was found to be the most suitable. Although there is good evidence to suggest that diffusion is an important transport mechanism, the breakthrough curves of the different tracers did not differ from each other as would be predicted based on the free-water diffusion coefficients. This suggested that solute diffusion in wastes requires further study.

Quantifying the effect of settlement and gas on solute flow and transport through treated municipal solid waste

The effect of degradation and settlement on transport properties of mechanically and biologically treated (MBT) waste was examined by applying three different tracers to two waste columns (~0.5 m diameter) in a series of closed-loop experiments. One column was allowed to biodegrade and the other was bio-suppressed. Permeability and drainable porosity were reduced by settlement, in line with previous results. A dual-porosity model performed well against the data and suggested that more preferential flow occurred early on in the un-degraded column. Diffusion timescales were found to be between 0.8 and 6 days. Volumetric water contents of the mobile region were found to be small in the bio-suppressed cell (~0.01) and even smaller values were found in the degrading waste, possibly due to displacement by gas. Once either settlement or gas production had disrupted this pattern into a more even flow, subsequent compression made little difference to the diffusion time-scale. This may indicate that transport was thereafter dominated by other aspects of the waste structure such as the distribution of low-permeability objects. The presence of gas in the degrading waste reduced the volumetric water content through displacement. The model indicated that the gas was primarily located in the more mobile porosity fraction. Primary compression of the degrading waste tended to squeeze this gas out of the waste in preference to water.

Investigating the effect of compression on solute transport through degrading municipal solid waste

The effect of applied compression on the nature of liquid flow and hence the movement of contaminants within municipal solid waste was examined by means of thirteen tracer tests conducted on five separate waste samples. The conservative nature of bromide, lithium and deuterium tracers was evaluated and linked to the presence of degradation in the sample. Lithium and deuterium tracers were non-conservative in the presence of degradation, whereas the bromide remained effectively conservative under all conditions. Solute diffusion times into and out of less mobile blocks of waste were compared for each test under the assumption of dominantly dual-porosity flow. Despite the fact that hydraulic conductivity changed strongly with applied stress, the block diffusion times were found to be much less sensitive to compression. A simple conceptual model, whereby flow is dominated by sub-parallel low permeability obstructions which define predominantly horizontally aligned less mobile zones, is able to explain this result. Compression tends to narrow the gap between the obstructions, but not significantly alter the horizontal length scale. Irrespective of knowledge of the true flow pattern, these results show that simple models of solute flushing from landfill which do not include depth dependent changes in solute transport parameters are justified.

Transport of Mecoprop through Mercia Mudstone and Oxford Clay at the laboratory scale

Abstract Laboratory column tests have been carried out to assess the transport behaviour of Mecoprop in Mercia Mudstone clay and Oxford Clay. Artificially consolidated clay samples were compressed in a triaxial cell to stresses representative of those at the base of a landfill. Uniform steady flow was achieved, and there was no evidence of ‘bypass’ flow in one or more fast streamtubes. Analysis of Mecoprop and bromide breakthrough curves showed that the transport characteristics were linear (within noise), with no evidence of irreversible sorption. The possibility of dual-porosity or kinetic sorption processes was not conclusively eliminated. Truncated temporal moments allowed estimates of the linear retardation factor for Mecoprop, which were shown to be a lower bound. Based on modelling, the retardation factor of Mecoprop in Oxford Clay was estimated to be 17.1, compared with 65.4 in batch sorption tests. The mean retardation factor for Mecoprop in Mercia Mudstone was 3.6, whereas the value from batch sorption tests was 10.0. These data confirm that retardation factors calculated from sorption isotherms obtained from batch experiments on disaggregated samples substantially overestimate the retardation likely to be observed in compacted clay liners; therefore values from batch tests should be used with caution in groundwater risk assessments.

Doublet tracer tests to determine the contaminant flushing properties of a municipal solid waste landfill

This paper describes a programme of research investigating horizontal fluid flow and solute transport through saturated municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill. The purpose is to inform engineering strategies for future contaminant flushing. Solute transport between injection/abstraction well pairs (doublets) is investigated using three tracers over five separate tests at well separations between 5m and 20m. Two inorganic tracers (lithium and bromide) were used, plus the fluorescent dye tracer, rhodamine-WT. There was no evidence for persistent preferential horizons or pathways at the inter-well scale. The time for tracer movement to the abstraction wells varied with well spacing as predicted for a homogeneous isotropic continuum. The time for tracer movement to remote observation wells was also as expected. Mobile porosity was estimated as ~0.02 (~4% of total porosity). Good fits to the tracer breakthrough data were achieved using a dual-porosity model, with immobile regions characterised by block diffusion timescales in the range of about one to ten years. This implies that diffusional exchanges are likely to be very significant for engineering of whole-site contaminant flushing and possibly rate-limiting.

Evaluating the Applicability of the Radial Approximation for Pile Heat Exchangers

This paper appraises the efficacy of using an analytical radial approximation for different thermal pile heat exchanger geometries. Unsteady radial heat-flow from fluid in a pipe set within a grouted borehole into the external ground is well-documented and can be solved analytically very rapidly using Laplace Transforms (Javed and Claesson 2011). By comparing the radial model with finite-element simulations including explicit pile geometries, this paper provides a provisional analysis of the accuracy of this approach. Initial findings suggest that the radial model may provide an appropriate approximation to pile behaviour for certain pipe configurations, albeit with small ‘mid-time’ error.