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EVALUATION OF THE EFFECTS OF PHYSICAL AND GEOCHEMICAL HETEROGENEITY ON VIRUS
TRANSPORT IN AQUIFERS (SGER )

Objective:

The purpose of this project is to obtain initial data to quantify virus
transport in physically and geochemically heterogeneous, unconsolidated aquifer
materials under carefully controlled laboratory conditions and to incorporate
the observational results in a stochastic model of virus transport in aquifers.
This work is considered to be "high risk" in that the hypotheses set forth based
on related work and heuristic arguments not previously tested. Initial results
obtained under this effort will be utilized in a full proposal to NSF at a later
time.

Procedure:

To test the hypotheses that virus transport properties are correlated to the
hydraulic conductivity and geochemical heterogeneity of the porous medium,
"synthetic" porous media will be created by purchasing quartz sand available in
eight well-sorted size fractions and coating the sand with desired percentages
of ferric oxyhydroxides. The synthetic sand and bacteriophage virus PRD1 will be
used in a series of column studies designed to determine local-scale transport
parameters for columns containing sands of differing hydraulic conductivity and
percentage surface coatings. The observational findings will be incorporated in
a streamline-based stochastic model to evaluate (1) the effect of coupling of
local-scale virus transport phenomena with a three-dimensional random-field
model of aquifer hydraulic conductivity, including the effect of geochemical
heterogeneity, and (2) the importance of the effect of this local-scale
interaction on large-scale virus transport in heterogeneous media.