Transport under advective trapping

Advective trapping occurs when solute enters low velocity zones in heterogeneous porous media. Classical local modelling approaches combine the impact of slow advection and diffusion into a hydrodynamic dispersion coefficient and many temporally non-local approaches lump these mechanisms into a sing...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Hidalgo, Juan J., Neuweiler, I., Dentz, Marco
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/223941
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/223941
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Geological flows
Heterogeneous porous media
Mixing and dispersion
Geophysical flows
Descripción
Sumario:Advective trapping occurs when solute enters low velocity zones in heterogeneous porous media. Classical local modelling approaches combine the impact of slow advection and diffusion into a hydrodynamic dispersion coefficient and many temporally non-local approaches lump these mechanisms into a single memory function. This joint treatment makes parameterization difficult and thus prediction of large-scale transport a challenge. Here, we investigate the mechanisms of advective trapping and their impact on transport in media composed of a high conductivity background and isolated low permeability inclusions. Breakthrough curves show that effective transport changes from a streamtube-like behaviour to genuine random trapping as the degree of disorder of the inclusion arrangement increases. We upscale this behaviour using a Lagrangian view point, in which idealized solute particles transition over a fixed distance at random advection times combined with Poissonian advective trapping events. We discuss the mathematical formulation of the upscaled model in the continuous time random walk and mobile–immobile mass transfer frameworks, and derive a model for large-scale solute non-Fickian dispersion. These findings give new insight into transport in highly heterogeneous media.