Field Trials of Chaotic Advection to Enhance Reagent Delivery

Abstract

AbstractChaotic advection is a novel approach that has the potential to enhance contact between an injected reagent and target contaminants, and thereby improve the effectiveness of in situ treatment technologies. One configuration that is capable of generating chaotic advection is termed the rotated potential mixing (RPM) flow. A conventional RPM flow system involves periodically reoriented dipole flow driven by transient switching of pressures at a series of radial wells. To determine whether chaotic advection can be engineered using such an RPM flow system, and to assess the consequent impact on the spatial distribution of a conservative tracer, a series of field‐scale experiments were conducted. These experiments involved the injection of a tracer in the center of a circular array of wells followed by either mixing using an engineered RPM flow system to invoke chaotic advection, or by natural processes (advection and diffusion) as the control. Pressure fluctuations from the mixing tests using the RPM flow system showed consistent peak amplitudes during injection and extraction at a frequency corresponding to the switching time, suggesting that the target hydraulic behavior was achieved with the time‐dependent flow field. The tracer breakthrough responses showed oscillatory behavior at all monitoring locations during the mixing tests which indicated that the desired RPM flow was generated. The presence of chaotic advection was supported by comparisons to observations from a previous laboratory experiment using RPM flow, and the Fourier spectrum of the temporal tracer data. Results from several quantitative metrics adopted to demonstrate field‐scale evidence of chaotic advection showed that mixing led to improved lateral tracer spreading and approximately uniform concentrations across the monitoring network. The multiple lines of evidence assembled in this proof‐of‐concept study conclusively demonstrated that chaotic advection can be engineered at the field scale. This investigation is a critical step in the development of chaotic advection as a viable and efficient approach to enhance reagent delivery.