Colloid straining within saturated heterogeneous porous media.

The transport of 0.46 μm, 2.94 μm, 5.1 μm and 6.06 μm latex particles in heterogeneous porous media prepared from the mixing of 0.78 mm, 0.46 mm and 0.23 mm quartz sands was investigated through column transport experiments. It was observed that the 0.46 μm particles traveled conservatively within the heterogeneous porous media, suggesting that under the experimental conditions employed in this research the strong repulsive interactions between the negatively charged latex particles and the clean quartz sands led to minimal colloid immobilization due to physicochemical filtration. The immobilization of the 2.94 μm, 5.1 μm and 6.06 μm latex particles was thus attributed to colloid straining. Experimental results showed that the straining of colloidal particles within heterogeneous sand mixtures increased when the fraction of finer sands increased. The mathematical model that was developed and tested based on results obtained using uniform sands (Xu et al., 2006) was found to be able to describe colloid straining within heterogeneous porous media. Examination of the relationship between the best-fit values of the clean-bed straining rate coefficients (k(0)) and the ratio of colloid diameter (d(p)) and sand grain size (d(g)) indicated that when number-average sizes were used to represent the size of the heterogeneous porous media, there existed a consistent relationship for both uniform sands and heterogeneous sand mixtures. Similarly, the use of the number-averaged sizes for the heterogeneous porous media produced a uniform relationship between the colloid straining capacity term (λ) and the ratio of d(p)/d(g) for all the sand treatments.