Column Experiments in Saturated Porous Media Studying Contaminant Transport

Column experiments are one key technique to investigate transport phenomena of contaminants in water-bearing porous media. In the following a brief description of the principal setup and main experimental techniques used in column experiments is given. In addition, three examples for column experiments investigating different contaminant transport phenomena are described. The examples deal with the determination of sorption coefficients by column experiments, size exclusion effects of colloids, and Am-humic colloid dissociation kinetics. Keywords: column experiments; contaminant transport; sorption coefficients; colloid transport; dissociation kinetics; humic colloids