The effect of morphological disorder on hydrodynamic dispersion in flow through porous media

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Abstract
The authors study hydrodynamic dispersion in flow through a disordered porous medium. The main goals are to investigate the condition(s) under which a convective-diffusion equation (CDE) cannot describe dispersion processes and to investigate the effect of the disordered morphology of the pore space on dispersion processes. They first use simple models of porous media and study dispersion processes analytically and compare the results with the predictions of the CDE. The results show that the morphology of the porous medium can strongly affect dispersion processes. They then use a Monte Carlo simulation approach to study dispersion processes in random network models of porous media which are made of interconnected capillary tubes with distributed effective radii. A percolation network is used as a prototype of porous media with disordered topology. They show that, as the percolation threshold Xc of the network is approached, there exists an anomalous and length-dependent dispersion regime that cannot be described by the CDE. They propose a generalisation of the Gaussian distribution to describe dispersion in the anomalous regime, and confirm it by Monte Carlo simulations.

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