Percolation Model for Groundwater Aquifer and Its Transport Properties

Bhunia, Snehadip (2025) Percolation Model for Groundwater Aquifer and Its Transport Properties. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

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Abstract

This thesis explores a novel approach to model the morphology of the subsurface water storage aquifers, using the tools of statistical mechanics and computational physics. Though there are microscopic models and macroscopic formulations to describe the flow through porous medium, the aquifer system was still deprived of having a suitable model. In this thesis we attempted to build up a computational framework to model the aquifer system using self avoiding random walk (SARW) discarding the conventional percolation theory and then we proceeded to address the transport property of aquifer as well. At the penultimate part there is discussion on the introduction of air bubbles inside the aquifer water channels. We not only model the system but also we discuss how SARWs can better capture the tortuosity and disorder of real-world porous structures. We perform conductivity analysis using both Monte Carlo simulations and a matrix-based numerical approach, examining how the modeled structures influence fluid mobility across the medium. The results indicate that SARW-based structures exhibit different scaling behavior in conductivity, highlighting the non-trivial role of microscopic geometry in macroscopic transport. Overall, this thesis contributes a novel and interdisciplinary approach to modeling groundwater flow, combining hydrogeological understanding with tools from statistical physics and computational science. The insights gained from SARW-based modeling provide a new lens through which fluid transport in porous media can be understood, simulated, and predicted. This work lays the groundwork for future studies that may integrate experimental data, scale up to three-dimensional domains, or incorporate reactive transport and temporal variability, aiming toward a more comprehensive framework for subsurface flow modeling.

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