Experimental Investigation of Mixing in Aperiodic Heterogeneous Porous Media: Comparison with Stochastic Transport Theory

An electrochemical technique was used to measure concentration distributions in an aperiodic heterogeneous model for comparison with a stochastic transport theory. Four identical columns, each filled with a homogeneous distribution of glass beads, were threaded together to create a single model with aperiodic heterogeneity. The layers in the model were arranged in different ways providing 24 realizations of the permeability distribution. Comparisons between experimental moment data and moments of simulated mean concentration distributions showed that the model was not able to accurately predict experimentally observed mixing behavior.