Department of Environmental Sciences

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University of New Jersey
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Seminar Abstracts
Environmental Sciences Seminar Abstract            

  Enhanced Mixing in Porous Media by Time-Dependant Oscillatory Flow
1,2Annette Dathe, 1Pengfei Zhang, and 3Amvrossios C. Bagtzoglou
1Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, City College of New York
2now at: Department of Horticulture, Pennsylvania State University
3Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut

Time dependent oscillatory flow can induce chaotic advection which refers to the highly complicated particle trajectories observed in the Lagrangian frame of reference under simple well-behaved velocity fields. Recent theoretical work indicates that time-periodic oscillations in low Reynolds (laminar) regimes can cause laminar flows to exhibit very complicated particle trajectories and cause substantial mixing in porous media. If proved successful, the chaotic advection methodology would allow the processes of bioremediation to occur much faster by enhancing the mixing of nutrients and microorganisms. This work intends to verify the theoretical work using a newly developed light reflection imaging system that is capable of real time quantitative monitoring of low concentrations of fluorescent dye and colloids. A fluorescent dye is injected into a decimeter-scale flow chamber filled with clean quartz sand via a well-triplet located at the center of the chamber. Dye distributions within the flow chamber are imaged over time and converted to absolute concentrations based on calibration curves. Two flow schemes are used, a time-dependent oscillatory flow scheme and a constant flow scheme (control). To establish the oscillatory flow, one of the three wells is randomly assigned a pumping magnitude with realistic constrains and a direction (injection or withdrawal), and the magnitude is then randomly partitioned to the other wells, which are assigned the opposite flow direction of the first well. For the control experiment, one well is constantly injecting while the other two are both withdrawing at half the rate of the first well. Our results show that the dye plume produced by the oscillating flow is more contained than the dye plume from the control experiment. In the early stage of the experiment, the dye concentration is lower in the contained plume, while showing higher fluctuations over time. This indicates a better mixing for the time-dependent oscillatory flow than for the control experiment.


Last updated: 03/04/2008