Experimental Research on the Thresholds of Scale-Dependent Dispersivity of Solute Transport

Abstract

Abstract The conventional advection-dispersion equation (ADE) has been widely used to describe the solute transport in porous media. However, it cannot interpret the phenomena of the early arrival and long tailing in breakthrough curves (BTCs). In this study, we aim to experimentally investigate the behaviors of the solute transport in both homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media. The linear-asymptotic model (LAF solution) with scale-dependent dispersivity was used to fit the BTCs, which was compared with the results of the ADE model and the conventional truncated power-law (TPL) model. Results indicate that (1) the LAF model with linear scale-dependent dispersivity could better capture the evolution of BTCs than the ADE model; (2) dispersivity initially increases linearly with the travel distance and is stable at some limited value over a large distance, and a threshold value of the travel distance is provided to reflect the constant dispersivity; and (3) compared with the TPL model, both the LAF and ADE models can capture the behavior of solute transport as a whole. For fitting the early arrival, the LAF model is less than the TPL; however, the LAF model is more concise in mathematics and its application will be studied in the future.