Favorable and unfavorable attachment of colloids in a discrete sandstone fracture

Direct visualization of colloid transport over natural heterogeneous and artificial smooth rock surfaces

“…Nevertheless, the surface chemical or mineralogical composition effects on colloid retention remain unclear. It was found that colloid retention and deposition on fracture surfaces can occur under both electrostatically repulsive (unfavorable) and attractive (favorable) conditions, for rock fracture (Alonso et al, 2009;Albarran et al, 2013;Spanik et al, 2021) and rough glass (Rasmuson et al, 2019;Ron & Johnson, 2020) surfaces. In some cases, it was impossible to establish a correlation between the presence of specific minerals on the surface and colloid deposition (Chinju et al, 2001;Albarran et al, 2013).…”

“…Stoll et al (2016) shown that in colloid transport experiments in a flow cell with two surface types (a natural rock sample and an acrylic surface), the surface roughness plays an important role in colloid retention. In some studies, a new fracture is created in a solid rock block (Spanik et al, 2021). However, flow-through experiments have shown that fracture surfaces can evolve physically and chemically as they are weathered by environmental flow processes (Weisbrod et al, 2000;Noiriel J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Journal Pre-proof et al, 2007).…”