Experiment on Scaled Medium
In work supported by the Subsurface Science
Program at the U.S. Department of Energy, this flow cell was filled to mimic
three levels of a Sierpinski Carpet in an effort to study flow and chemical
transport in a structured porous medium. Results from this series of
experiments include response to pumping (steady state), response of the
piezometers to regional flow, response for chemical tracer tests, and response
to injection of latex particles.
Instrumentation on this tank included a single inflow reservoir, three outflow
reservoirs, 25 piezometers, and two fully penetrating wells. The light material
in this picture is a fine sand with a hydrualic conductivity of approximately
0.057 cm/sec. The darker material is a coarser sand with a hydraulic conductivity
of approximatley 0.50 cm/sec. The red color is red food coloring, used as a
color tracer, moving with regional flow from the left side to the right side of
this picture. The dye was added as a pulse input in the left reservoir.
Papers analyzing the results of these experiments have been presented at AGU
and have appeared in two papers.
Silliman, S.E., L. Zheng, and P. Conwell, "The use of laboratory
experiments for the study of conservative solute transport in heterogeneous
porous media", Hydrogeology Journal, 6, 166-177, 1998.
Silliman, S.E., and