The objective of this project was to characterize the influence that naturally complex geologic media has on anomalous dispersion and to determine if the nature of dispersion can be estimated from the underlying heterogeneous media. The UNM portion of this project was to provide detailed representations of aquifer heterogeneity through producing highly-resolved models of outcrop analogs to aquifer materials. This project combined outcrop-scale heterogeneity characterization (conducted at the University of New Mexico), laboratory experiments (conducted at Sandia National Laboratory), and numerical simulations (conducted at Sandia National Laboratory and Colorado School of Mines). The study was designed to test whether established dispersion theory accurately predicts the behavior of solute transport through heterogeneous media and to investigate the relationship between heterogeneity and the parameters that populate these models. The dispersion theory tested by this work was based upon the fractional advection-dispersion equation (fADE) model. Unlike most dispersion studies that develop a solute transport model by fitting the solute transport breakthrough curve, this project explored the nature of the heterogeneous media to better understand the connection between the model parameters and the aquifer heterogeneity. We also evaluated methods for simulating the heterogeneity to see whether these approaches (e.g., geostatistical) could reasonably replicate realistic …

The objective of the Abrasion Testing of Critical Components of Hydrokinetic Devices (Project) was to test critical components of hydrokinetic devices in waters with high levels of suspended sediment – information that is widely applicable to the hydrokinetic industry. Tidal and river sites in Alaska typically have high suspended sediment concentrations. High suspended sediment also occurs in major rivers and estuaries throughout the world and throughout high latitude locations where glacial inputs introduce silt into water bodies. In assessing the vulnerability of technology components to sediment induced abrasion, one of the greatest concerns is the impact that the sediment may have on device components such as bearings and seals, failures of which could lead to both efficiency loss and catastrophic system failures.