Section: New Results

Upscaling transfer properties in heterogeneous porous media

Participant : Vincent Guinot.

In [9] the passive solute transport was studied in a periodic, artificial porous medium. A Laplace analysis of the breakthrough curves indicates that the widely used, classical Advection-Dispersion (AD) model cannot reproduce the contaminant transport features accurately. Neither can fractional dynamics-based, anomalous dispersion models. The models failing to reproduce the features of contaminant transport is shown to be due to the Fick-like, gradient-based operator used to represent dispersion, that induces infinite signal propagation speed, even when fractional models are used. The Laplace analysis shows that advection processes are predominant at all time and space scales. The size of the Representative Elementary Volume is shown to be 20 to 30 periods.