Structure induced laminar vortices control anomalous dispersion in porous media
Ankur Deep Bordoloi (),
David Scheidweiler,
Marco Dentz,
Mohammed Bouabdellaoui,
Marco Abbarchi and
Pietro de Anna ()
Additional contact information
Ankur Deep Bordoloi: Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Lausanne
David Scheidweiler: Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Lausanne
Marco Dentz: Spanish National Research Council (IDAEA-CSIC)
Mohammed Bouabdellaoui: Aix Marseille Univ, Université de Toulon, CNRS, IM2NP
Marco Abbarchi: Aix Marseille Univ, Université de Toulon, CNRS, IM2NP
Pietro de Anna: Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Lausanne
Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-10
Abstract:
Abstract Natural porous systems, such as soil, membranes, and biological tissues comprise disordered structures characterized by dead-end pores connected to a network of percolating channels. The release and dispersion of particles, solutes, and microorganisms from such features is key for a broad range of environmental and medical applications including soil remediation, filtration and drug delivery. Yet, owing to the stagnant and opaque nature of these disordered systems, the role of microscopic structure and flow on the dispersion of particles and solutes remains poorly understood. Here, we use a microfluidic model system that features a pore structure characterized by distributed dead-ends to determine how particles are transported, retained and dispersed. We observe strong tailing of arrival time distributions at the outlet of the medium characterized by power-law decay with an exponent of 2/3. Using numerical simulations and an analytical model, we link this behavior to particles initially located within dead-end pores, and explain the tailing exponent with a hopping across and rolling along the streamlines of vortices within dead-end pores. We quantify such anomalous dispersal by a stochastic model that predicts the full evolution of arrival times. Our results demonstrate how microscopic flow structures can impact macroscopic particle transport.
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31552-5 Abstract (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-31552-5
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31552-5
Access Statistics for this article
Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie
More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().