Water and ion diffusion in partially-water saturated compacted kaolinite: Role played by vapor-phase diffusion in water mobility.

Diffusion is the main transport process of water and solutes in clay-rich porous media owing to their very low permeability, so they are widely used as barriers against contaminant spreading. However, the prediction of contaminant mobility can be very complicated when these media are partially water-saturated. We conducted diffusion experiments for water (HTO and HDO) and ions (Na and I) through partially water saturated compacted kaolinite, a weakly charged clay material, to quantify the distinct diffusive behavior of these species.

Pore-Scale Mixing and the Evolution of Hydrodynamic Dispersion in Porous Media.

We study the interplay of pore-scale mixing and network-scale advection through heterogeneous porous media, and its role for the evolution and asymptotic behavior of hydrodynamic dispersion. In a Lagrangian framework, we identify three fundamental mechanisms of pore-scale mixing that determine large scale particle motion, namely, the smoothing of intrapore velocity contrasts, the increase of the tortuosity of particle paths, and the setting of a maximum time for particle transitions. Based on these mechanisms, we derive a theory that predicts anomalous and normal hydrodynamic dispersion in terms of the characteristic pore length, Eulerian velocity distribution, and Péclet number.

Self-averaging and weak ergodicity breaking of diffusion in heterogeneous media.

Diffusion in natural and engineered media is quantified in terms of stochastic models for the heterogeneity-induced fluctuations of particle motion. However, fundamental properties such as ergodicity and self-averaging and their dependence on the disorder distribution are often not known. Here, we investigate these questions for diffusion in quenched disordered media characterized by spatially varying retardation properties, which account for particle retention due to physical or chemical interactions with the medium.

Erratum: Self-averaging and ergodicity of subdiffusion in quenched random media [Phys. Rev. E 93, 010101(R) (2016)].

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.93.

Self-averaging and ergodicity of subdiffusion in quenched random media.

We study the self-averaging properties and ergodicity of the mean square displacement m(t) of particles diffusing in d dimensional quenched random environments which give rise to subdiffusive average motion. These properties are investigated in terms of the sample to sample fluctuations as measured by the variance of m(t). We find that m(t) is not self-averaging for d<2 due to the inefficient disorder sampling by random motion in a single realization.