Effective Reactive Surface Area: an Anisotropic Property of Physically and Chemically Heterogeneous Porous Media

Abstract

AbstractAlthough transport calculations are often formulated in terms of mass-based isotropic distribution coefficients, it is the abundance of reactive surface areas of subsurface materials that controls contaminant adsorption. In water-saturated homogeneous systems devoid of advective fluxes (e.g., batch experiments), the available reactive surface area is similar to the total surface area (as measured by conventional methods such as BET gas adsorption). However, in physically and chemically heterogeneous systems with advective fluxes, the effective reactive surface area (i.e., the surface area that a packet of advecting water interacts with) is smaller than the laboratory measured surface area and is a complex function of advective velocity and the correlation structures of the physical and chemical heterogeneities. Theoretical derivations for an important but simple type of heterogeneity (fine-scale horizontal layering) suggest that the effective reactive surface area is an anisotropic property of the medium and is inversely correlated with the anisotropy in hydraulic conductivity. The implications of reactive transport anisotropy include the concept that the retardation factor should be treated as a directional property rather than being treated as a constant. Furthermore, because of the inverse relationship between effective reactive surface area and hydraulic conductivity, batch adsorption experiments tend to overestimate the retention of contaminants relative to intact natural materials.