Creating and Editing Environmental Media

Environmental media (such as water, air, and soil) are the basic "building blocks" of transport pathways.  For each pathway in GoldSim, you must define the environmental media which are contained in the pathway, and mass transport calculations are based, to a large extent, on the properties of these media.

There are two types of environmental media in GoldSim: Fluids and Solids.  The kinds of media represented by these two types are self-evident: Fluids are used to represent media such as water, air, oil and blood; Solids are used to represent media such as soil, rock, sediment and muscle tissue.

One of the key property sets for an environmental medium is the set of partition coefficients for the various species with respect to that medium.  A partition coefficient quantifies the degree to which a species partitions between media, and is expressed as the ratio of the concentration in one medium to the concentration in another medium (at equilibrium).  In GoldSim, all partition coefficients must be expressed relative to the Reference Fluid. In most cases, the Reference Fluid will be water.

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