Critical Role of the Immobile Zone in Non-Fickian Two-Phase Transport: A New Paradigm

Using a visualization setup, we characterized the solute transport in a micromodel filled with two fluid phases using direct, real-time imaging. By processing the time series of images of solute transport (dispersion) in a two fluid-phase filled micromodel, we directly delineated the change of transport hydrodynamics as a result of fluid-phase occupancy. We found that, in the water saturation range of 0.6–0.8, the macroscopic dispersion coefficient reaches its maximum value and the coefficient was 1 order of magnitude larger than that in single fluid-phase flow in the same micromodel. The experimental results indicate that this non-monotonic, non-Fickian transport is saturation- and flow-rate-dependent. Using real-time visualization of the resident concentration (averaged concentration over a representative elementary volume of the pore network), we directly estimated the hydrodynamically stagnant (immobile) zones and the mass transfer between mobile and immobile zones. We identified (a) the nonlinear contribution of the immobile zones to the non-Fickian transport under transient transport conditions and (b) the non-monotonic fate of immobile zones with respect to saturation under single and two fluid-phase conditions in a micromodel. These two findings highlight the serious flaws in the assumptions of the conventional mobile–immobile model (MIM), which is commonly used to characterize the transport under two fluid-phase conditions.