Colloid dispersion on the pore scale

Dispersion describes the spreading of a tracer or contaminant in an aquifer. Detailed knowledge of dispersion is the key to successful risk assessment in case of groundwater pollution or groundwater protection. The dispersion of colloids on the pore scale is controlled by flow velocity, ionic strength, colloid size, colloid concentration, and colloid–matrix interactions. The objective of this study was to provide quantitative data and to assess the scale dependency of colloid dispersion on the pore scale. The positions of carboxylated polystyrene microspheres (1 μm, 0.5 μm) were recorded during transport experiments in silicon micromodels with three pore topologies. The positions were combined into particle trajectories revealing the flow path of individual colloids. More than thousand trajectories were evaluated for each experiment to obtain the dispersivity of the colloids for flow distances between 10 and 1000 μm. All experiments were run at high Peclet numbers. The pore scale dispersivity was on the order of 8–30% of the flow distance with pure water, dependent on the heterogeneity of the pore topology. The dispersivity was positively correlated with the ionic strength and inversely correlated with the colloid size and the flow velocity. A coating of the micromodel surface with humic acid also increased dispersivity. The quantitative data set presented here supports the theoretical framework for colloid transport and allows to parametrize colloid transport on the pore scale.