Anomalous Transport in “Classical” Soil and Sand Columns

By A. Cortis, Brian Berkowitz. Soil Science Society of America Journal, 2004

261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We re-examine-in light of recent theoretical developments-clasaical experiments on dispersion of a passive tracer in fully and partially saturated porous columns. We find that the dispersion breakthrough curves (BTCs) exhibit anomalous (non-Fickian) early arrival times and late time tailing, which can be explained by the Continuous Time Random Walk (CTRW) theory. The CTRW framework includes as a special case the classical advection-dispersion equation (ADE) for Fickian transport. We argue that existing measurements and interpretations of dispersion should be carefully reconsidered in the framework of these advances in conceptual understanding and quantification.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae51a8c187339f77ea1e7aebc3c4aea6ace12f36

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Citations in the corpus

FracFit: A robust parameter estimation tool for fractional calculus models (2017, background): “, 2014] and subsurface [Benson et al., 2001; Berkowitz and Scher, 1997; Cortis and Berkowitz, 2004; Wang and Cardenas, 2014; LeBorgne and Gouze, 2008; Becker and Shapiro, 2000] water environments.”
Perspective on theories of non-Fickian transport in heterogeneous media (2009, background): “Non-Fickian transport behavior has been observed both in the laboratory [78,79,47,13,58] and in the field [68,80,48,32,77,92].”
Time and space nonlocalities underlying fractional-derivative models: Distinction and literature review of field applications (2009, background): “Anomalous transport (despite the somewhat misleading nomenclature) is very often found at all scales – from pore scale simulations [144], soil cores [24,33,92,116], laboratory experiments [70,79,119,133], to fieldscale observations (e.”
Simulating Solute Transport in Porous or Fractured Formations Using Random Walk Particle Tracking: A Review (2005, background): “For each elementary time step Gaussian transport often observed in field and laborat, the standard variable corresponding to the moving tory studies (Scher et al., 2002; Bromly and Hinz, 2004; particles is spread over the other cells within a dispersion Cortis and Berkowitz, 2004).”
Solute transport in low‐heterogeneity sandboxes: The role of correlation length and permeability variance (2014, background): “This work presents the first set of flow cell experiments that systematically measure the control of the correlation length on effective permeability and non-Fickian solute transport [Cortis and Berkowitz, 2004; Levy and Berkowitz, 2003].”
Comparison of alternative models for simulating anomalous solute transport in a large heterogeneous soil column (2009, methodology): “When p(s) can be assumed to be Gaussian, the one-dimensional CTRW model in Laplace domain can be written as follows (Dentz et al., 2004; Cortis and Berkowitz, 2004):”