HYDRAULIC CONDUCTIVITY SCALING IN A HOMOGENEOUS POROUS MEDIUM

Modeling of flow and transport in porous media requires information about the magnitudes and spatial distributions of hydrodynamic and hydrodispersive parameters of the porous media. Measurements of such parameters, available only at a limited number of locations, are often obtained by means of different techniques and can be representative of various measurement scales. The use of available data, necessarily distributed on different scales, for characterizing porous media at a defined scale is a key question and of great interest. With the aim to investigate on the hydraulic conductivity scale effect on a homogeneous porous medium several experiments were carried out at the Hydrogeosite Laboratory (Marsico Nuovo, Italy). This laboratory is a large scale model sized 10×7×3 m^3 filled with a homogeneous medium made up of quartz-rich sand. The results are described by separating the two important scale-ambits under consideration, obtaining two scale power laws. Moreover, the hydraulic conductivity scale effect has been detected considering the water flow type (uniform or radial) into the porous medium. However, the results, either considering the only scale law or multi-scale laws confirm what was proved by several authors for heterogeneous porous media, that is the trend of hydraulic conductivity to reach a higher limit when the measurement scale increases and, in our opinion, regardless the heterogeneity of the porous medium.