In Situ Measurement of Electroosmotic Fluxes and Conductivity Using Single Well Bore Tracer Tests

Electroosmosis (EO), the movement of water through porous media in response to an electric field, offers a means for extracting contaminated groundwater from fine-grained sediments such as clays that are not easily amenable to conventional pump-and-treat approaches. The EO-induced water flux is proportional to the voltage gradient in a manner analogous to the flux dependence on the hydraulic gradient under Darcy’s law. The proportionality constant, the soil electroosmotic conductivity or keo, is most easily measured in soil cores using bench-top tests where flow is one-dimensional and interfering effects attributable to Darcy’s law can be directly accounted for. In contrast, quantification of EO fluxes and keo in the field under deployment conditions can be difficult because electrodes are deployed in groundwater wells that may be screened across heterogeneous mixture of lithologies. As a result, EO-induced water fluxes constitute an approximate radial flow system that is superimposed upon a Darcy flow regime through permeable pathways that may or may not be coupled with hydraulic head differences created by the EO-induced water fluxes. A single well comparative tracer test, which indirectly measures EO fluxes by comparing well bore tracer dilution rates between background and EO-induced water fluxes, may provide a means for routinely quantifying the efficacy of EO systems in such settings. EO fluxes measured in field tests through this technique at a groundwater contamination site were used to estimate a mean keo value through a semi-analytic line source model of the electric field. The resulting estimate agrees well with values reported in the literature as well as values obtained by bench-top tests conducted on a soil core collected in the test area.