Flux-based method of characteristics for contaminant transport in flowing groundwater

Abstract.

A numerical method for treating advection-dominated contaminant transport in flowing groundwater is described. This method combines advantages of numerical discretizations by finite volume methods (like local mass conservation and the positivity of solutions) and by methods of characteristics (like larger time steps and reduced artificial numerical dispersion). For one-dimensional problems the method can produce equivalent algebraic systems as the finite volume Eulerian–Lagrangian localized adjoint method [13] and the flux-based modified method of characteristics [23] (and some other methods). An extension of the “flux-based methods of characteristics” for complex transport problems on multidimensional unstructured computational grids is the main contribution of this paper. Numerical results are included for a well established test example using a flux-based method of characteristics with aligned finite volumes.