ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the physical, chemical, and biological postulates that are being used to construct bioremediation models, and on how these postulates should be expressed in model form. Groundwater contamination modeling began with the analysis of a single soluble chemical species undergoing one-dimensional convective and dispersive mass transport in response to a constant, saturated groundwater velocity. Groundwater contamination modeling is distinct from and should not be confused with groundwater modeling. In multicomponent transport modeling it is almost universally assumed that the continuum approach can be applied to average domain properties over scales that are substantially larger than molecular. Physical/chemical multicomponent mass transport groundwater contamination models are designed to analyze the fate of complex, interactive sources where the interactions may be quantified by conventional chemical reaction descriptions. Biological multicomponent mass transport models are formulated specifically to consider the impact of biological activity on the fate of subsurface cont.
