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Differential Transport And Dispersion Of Colloids Relative To Solutes In Single Fractures, Qinghuai Zheng, Sarah E. Dickson, Yiping Guo

Sarah E Dickson

This work employed numerical experiments simulating colloid and solute transport in single parallelplate fractures, using the random walk particle tracking method, to demonstrate that (1) there exists an aspect ratio of the colloid radius to half the fracture aperture, do, where the average velocities of colloids and solutes are similar. When d > do, the velocity distribution assumption is satisfied, and the fact that the ratio of the colloid transport velocity to the solute transport velocity, sp, decreases as d increases is well documented in the literature. However, when d < do, the velocity distribution assumption is violated, and sp increases as d increases and (2) the Taylor dispersion coefficient and its extension by James and Chrysikopoulos [S.C. James, C. V. Chrysikopoulos, J. Colloid Interface Sci. 263 (2003) 288] will overestimate the colloid dispersion coefficient significantly. Additionally, numerical experiments simulating colloid and solute transport in variable-aperture fractures demonstrated that sp and DL,coll /DL,solute decrease with increasing CoV, and the anisotropy ratio only plays a minor role compared to the CoV. These observations have important implications towards the interpretation of colloid transport in both porous and fractured media.