Role of hydrodynamic drag on microsphere deposition and re-entrainment in porous media under unfavorable conditions

Deposition and re-entrainment of 11 mu m microspheres were examined in packed glass beads and quartz sand under both favorable and unfavorable conditions for deposition. Experiments were performed at environmentally relevant ionic strengths and flow rates in the absence of solution chemistry and flow perturbations. Numerical simulations of experimental data were performed using kinetic rate coefficients to represent deposition and re-entrainment dynamics. Deposition rate coefficients increased with increasing flow rate under favorable deposition conditions (in the absence of colloid-grain surface electrostatic repulsion), consistent with expected trends from filtration theory. In contrast, under unfavorable deposition conditions (where significant colloid-grain surface electrostatic repulsion exists), the deposition rate coefficients decreased with increasing flow rate, suggesting a mitigating effect of hydrodynamic drag on deposition. Furthermore, the reentrainment rate was negligible under favorable conditions but was significant under unfavorable conditions and increased with increasing flow rate, demonstrating that hydrodynamic drag drove re-entrainment under unfavorable conditions. The drag torque resulting from hydrodynamic drag was found to be 1 order of magnitude or more lower than the adhesive torque based on pull-off forces from atomic force microscopy measurements. This result indicates that hydrodynamic drag was insufficient to drive reentrainment of microspheres that were associated with the grain surface via the primary energy minimum and suggests that hydrodynamic drag drove re-entrainment of secondary-minimum-associated microspheres.