Groundwater pollution by nutrients is one of the problems in the world. A lot of research have been done about the influence of nitrates on water quality, but understanding how the chemistry phosphate in groundwater is influenced by lithology is important.
A breakthrough curve for a groundwater contaminant is a relationship between the contaminant concentration and the time of arrival at a certain point downstream the source location. Contaminant movement in groundwater could be influenced by several mechanisms among which are dispersion, contaminant soil-interaction and contaminant decay. Typically, the dispersive behavior of a porous media is assessed with the use of a nonreactive tracer. The influence of other mechanisms are either obtained independently (by conducting for example batch experiments) or obtained by curve fitting using an appropriate transport model.
You can find analytical solutions to compute breakthrough curves in various configurations with the free software TRAC. It is available on http://trac.brgm.fr
The web page is in french but the software can be set to english (and spanish). It is a collaborative tool, so feel free to send your observations, input and translate it to other languages.
Tool for calculation of breakthrough curve from US EPA:
https://www3.epa.gov/ceampubl/learn2model/part-two/onsite/conc.html
There is a wealth of research on analyzing reactive solute transport in the subsurface in the soil science and contaminant hydrogeology literature. One place to start would be to look through the papers listed on http://www.u.arizona.edu/~brusseau/journals.htm. I have attached a couple of examples using models available for free from https://www.pc-progress.com/en/Default.aspx?stanmod.
Best,
KC
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