Transport of Solutes and Colloids in Multi-Scale Porous Media Under Single and Multi-Phase Flow: Microscopic Experiments and Pore-Scale Modeling

Transport of solutes and colloids over a large number of pores and for multiple scales were explored using micromodel experiments and analysis. In addition, we provided detailed insight into the interactions of solute and colloids with pore space heterogeneities. This was achieved by systematically changing the fraction of aggregates to perform different micromodel experiments. On these samples, we began by performing saturated transport experiments and continued by investigating the effect of drainage and imbibition cycles on colloid remobilization in the dual-porosity samples. During this study, several customized experimental tools have been developed to enable investigation of flow and transport of non-adsorbing solutes and colloids at the pore scale. For the computational part, we have used pore network modeling to further investigate the interaction of non-adsorbing solutes between the inter-aggregate and intra-aggregate pores. We developed a pore network generator for dual-porosity models and studied the effect of aggregate porosity and aggregate permeability.