U.S.-Germany Cooperative Research: Establishing a Porous Media Observational Facility at the University of Kassel, Germany

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This award supports the PI and co-PI, Dr. Tissa Illangasekare of Drexel University to collaborate with Manfred Koch of the Department of Geohydraulics and Engineering Hydrology at the University of Kassel. The collaboration will design and construct a large-scale (10-meter) experimental vessel containing structured porous media with measurable statistical properties comparable to that of a scaled, heterogeneous sand and gravel aquifer, and to use the vessel for observation of fluid flow and mass transport under controlled conditions. The ultimate goal is to improve prediction of aquifer contamination by comparison of observational results with stochastic and other mathematical models of a number of non-ideal contaminant transport processes. Almost any fluid dynamics problem in porous media could be studied in detail in the proposed vessel. Of special interest in this study are dense, miscible fluid transport, virus and colloid transport, and immiscible fluid flow. All of those topics are environmental problems for which widely-accepted, accurate predictive methods for transport in heterogeneous porous media are not currently available.