Effects of Flow Velocity and Particle Size on Transport of Ultrafine Bubbles in Porous Media

Abstract:

Potential applications of ultrafine bubbles (UFBs) have drawn more attention, especially in environmental engineering fields such as soil/groundwater remediation. Understanding a transport mechanism of UFBs in soils is essential to optimize remediation techniques using UFBs. In this study, column transport experiments using glass beads with different size fraction were conducted, where UFBs created by either air or oxygen were injected to the column with different flow conditions. Effects of particle size and flow velocities on transport characteristics of UFBs were investigated based on the column experiments. The results showed that attachments of UFBs were enhanced under lower water velocity condition, exhibiting more than 50% of UFBs injected were attached inside the column. The mobility of O2-UFBs which have lower zeta potential was higher than that of Air-UFBs. A convection-dispersion model including bubble attachment and detachment terms was applied to the obtained breakthrough curves for each experiment, showing good fitness against the measured data.