Recent advances in experimental studies of steady-state dilution and reactive mixing in saturated porous media

Abstract

Transverse dispersive mixing plays an important role in controlling natural attenuation of contaminant plumes and the performance of engineered remediation strategies. The extent of transverse mixing can be significantly affected by porous media heterogeneity and anisotropy. For instance, flow focusing in the high-permeability inclusions leads to an enhancement of dilution and reactive mixing in steady-state solute transport. Numerous modeling studies have been performed to understand the mechanism of conservative and reactive transport in homogeneous and complex heterogeneous porous media. However, experimental investigations are necessary to show an intuitive phenomenon and to validate the modeling results. This paper briefly reviews recent laboratory experimental studies on dilution and reactive mixing of steady-state transport in saturated homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media. In this context, setups and measuring techniques are described in pore-scale and Darcy-scale experiments. Parameters quantifying dilution and reactive mixing in the experiments are also introduced. Finally, we discuss the further experimental works necessary to deepen our understanding of dilution and reactive mixing in natural aquifers.