Experimental Visualization of Solute Transport and Mass Transfer Processes in Two-Dimensional Conductivity Fields with Connected Regions of High Conductivity

2004 
Solute transport displaying mass transfer behavior (i.e., tailing) occurs in many aquifers and soils. Spatial patterns of hydraulic conductivity may play a role because of both advection and diffusion through isolated low conductivity areas. We demonstrated such processes in laboratory experiments designed to visualize solute transport through a thin chamber (40 cm × 20 cm × 0.64 cm thick) packed with glass beads and containing circular emplacements of smaller glass beads with lower conductivity. The experiments used three different contrasts of conductivity between the large-bead matrix and the emplacements, targeting three different regimes of solute transport:  low contrast, targeting macrodispersion; intermediate contrast, targeting advection-dominated mass transfer between the high-conductivity regions and the emplacements; and high contrast, targeting diffusion-dominated mass transfer. Use of a strong light source, a high-resolution CCD camera, and a colorimetric dye produced images with a spatial r...
    • Correction
    • Source
    • Cite
    • Save
    • Machine Reading By IdeaReader
    28
    References
    108
    Citations
    NaN
    KQI
    []