Statistical mechanics of unsaturated porous media

Statistical mechanics of unsaturated porous media.

We explore a mean-field theory of fluid imbibition and drainage through permeable porous solids. In the limit of vanishing inertial and viscous forces, the theory predicts the hysteretic "retention curves" relating the capillary pressure applied across a connected domain to its degree of saturation in wetting fluid in terms of known surface energies and void space geometry. To avoid complicated...

Electrokinetic coupling in unsaturated porous media.

We consider a charged porous material that is saturated by two fluid phases that are immiscible and continuous on the scale of a representative elementary volume. The wetting phase for the grains is water and the nonwetting phase is assumed to be an electrically insulating viscous fluid. We use a volume-averaging approach to derive the linear constitutive equations for the electrical current de...

Deposition and mobilization of clay colloids in unsaturated porous media

[1] We report results on the effects of porewater pH and transients in porewater flow on the deposition and mobilization of colloid-sized clay particles within unsaturated sand columns. The deposition rates of illite under steady-flow conditions were essentially independent of pH, while the deposition rates of kaolinite nearly doubled as the pH decreased from 7.4 to 4.6. Mobilization of kaolini...

Fate of Escherichia Coli in Unsaturated Porous Media

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Modeling ion transport mechanisms in unsaturated porous media