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Effects of Grain and Pore Size on Salt Precipitation During Evaporation from Porous Media

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Abstract

Salt precipitation in saline porous media during evaporation is important in many processes including \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) sequestration, soil salinity which is a global problem as well as the preservation of monuments and buildings. In this study, X-ray micro-tomography was used to investigate the evolution of salt precipitation during evaporation to study the effects of particle and pore sizes on salt precipitation patterns and dynamics. The packed beds were saturated with NaCl solution of 3 Molal, and the time-lapsed X-ray imaging was continued for one day to obtain pore- scale information associated with the evaporation and precipitation dynamics and patterns. The results show that the presence of preferential evaporation sites (associated with fine pores) on the surface of the sand columns influences significantly the patterns and dynamics of NaCl precipitation. They confirm the formation of an increasingly thick and discrete salt crust with increasing grain size in the sand column due to the presence of fewer fine pores (preferential precipitation sites) at the surface compared to the sand packs with finer grains. Fewer fine pores on the surface also result in shorter stage-1 precipitation for the columns with larger grain sizes. A simple model for the evolution of salt crust thickness based on this principle shows a good agreement with our experiments. The findings of this study offer new insights about the dynamics and patterns of salt precipitation in drying porous media.

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Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to Dr. Siamak Tazari for his helpful discussion regarding the use of SVMs for the image processing, Prof. Martin Blunt for sharing the network extraction code developed in his group and Dr. Ali Q. Raeini for his help to run the code used to compute the pore size distribution using the X-ray images. We would like to thank Prof. Dani Or and Mr. Dani Breitenstein from ETH Zurich for enabling us to use their laser diffraction particle size analyser. The X-ray micro-tomography experiments in HMXST X-ray micro-tomography system were performed at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS) at Harvard University, a member of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN). Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge the assistance provided by the Manchester X-ray Imaging Facility to use the Nikon Custom Bay micro-tomography system, which was funded in part by the EPSRC (Grants EP/F007906/1, EP/F001452/1 and EP/I02249X/1). Acknowledgment is made to the donors of the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund for partial support of this research (PRF No. 52054-DNI6).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, University of Manchester, The Mill, Sackville Street, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Mansoureh Norouzi Rad & Nima Shokri

  2. School of Engineering, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Amir Keshmiri

  3. Manchester X-ray Imaging Facility, School of Materials, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Philip J. Withers

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  1. Mansoureh Norouzi Rad
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  4. Philip J. Withers
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Correspondence to Nima Shokri.

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Rad, M.N., Shokri, N., Keshmiri, A. et al. Effects of Grain and Pore Size on Salt Precipitation During Evaporation from Porous Media. Transp Porous Med 110, 281–294 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-015-0515-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-015-0515-8

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