Patent ID: 7047830

Claim:
A method for determining the location of a contaminant in a fluid flow system, comprising the steps of: (a) injecting a conservative tracer and a partitioning tracer into the flow system at a first location; (b) advecting the tracers along the flow system at a first velocity to create an advection flow field; (c) extracting the tracers at a second location in the flow system; (d) introducing a perturbation to the advection flow field at a perturbation time by changing and then re-establishing the advection flow at a second velocity, which may be different than the first velocity, creating a unique change in the concentration of the partition tracer; (e) extracting the partitioning tracer as a function of time relative to the perturbation time; (f) measuring the concentration of the partitioning tracer as a function of the time; and (g) determining the location of contamination from the time of arrival of the partitioning tracer relative to the perturbation time and the advection flow velocity.