Journal of Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers ISSN:1738-3692(Print) 2093-7709(Online) 한국농공학회논문집

Bacterial transport models were evaluated in this study to determine the suitable model at describing bacterial transport in saturated column experiments. Four models used in the evaluation were: advective-dispersive equation (ADE) + equilibrium sorption/retardation (ER) + kinetic reversible sorption (KR) (Model I), ADE + two-site sorption (Model 2), ADE + ER + kinetic irreversible sorption (KI) (Model 3), ADE + KR + KI (Model 4). Firstly, analyses were performed with the first experimental data, showing that Model 4 is appropriate for describing bacterial transport. Even if Model 1 and 2 fit well to the observed data, they have a defect of not including the irreversible sorption, which is directly related to mass loss of bacteria. Model 3 can not properly describe the tailing observed in the data. However, further analysis with the second data indicates that Model 4 can not describe retardation of bacteria, even if the sorption-related parameters are varied. Therefore, Model 4 is modified by incorporating retardation factor into the model, resulting in the improved fitting to the data. It indicates that the transport model, into which retardation, kinetic reversible sorption, and kinetic irreversible sorption are incorporated, is suitable at describing bacterial transport in saturated column experiments. It is expected that the selected transport model could be applied to properly analyze the bacterial transport in saturated porous media.