Dispersive mass transfer, in
fluid dynamics
In physics and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluids— liquids and gases. It has several subdisciplines, including ''aerodynamics'' (the study of air and other gases in motion) an ...
, is the spreading of mass from highly concentrated areas to less concentrated areas. It is one form of
mass transfer
Mass transfer is the net movement of mass from one location (usually meaning stream, phase, fraction or component) to another. Mass transfer occurs in many processes, such as absorption, evaporation, drying, precipitation, membrane filtration, ...
.
Dispersive mass flux is analogous to
diffusion
Diffusion is the net movement of anything (for example, atoms, ions, molecules, energy) generally from a region of higher concentration to a region of lower concentration. Diffusion is driven by a gradient in Gibbs free energy or chemical p ...
, and it can also be described using
Fick's first law:
:
where c is mass concentration of the species being dispersed, E is the dispersion coefficient, and x is the position in the direction of the concentration gradient. Dispersion can be differentiated from diffusion in that it is caused by non-ideal flow patterns (i.e. deviations from
plug flow In fluid mechanics, plug flow is a simple model of the velocity profile of a fluid flowing in a pipe. In plug flow, the velocity of the fluid is assumed to be constant across any cross-section of the pipe perpendicular to the axis of the pipe. T ...
) and is a macroscopic phenomenon, whereas diffusion is caused by random molecular motions (i.e.
Brownian motion
Brownian motion, or pedesis (from grc, πήδησις "leaping"), is the random motion of particles suspended in a medium (a liquid or a gas).
This pattern of motion typically consists of random fluctuations in a particle's position insi ...
) and is a microscopic phenomenon. Dispersion is often more significant than diffusion in
convection
Convection is single or multiphase fluid flow that occurs spontaneously due to the combined effects of material property heterogeneity and body forces on a fluid, most commonly density and gravity (see buoyancy). When the cause of the convec ...
-diffusion problems. The dispersion coefficient is frequently modeled as the product of the fluid velocity, ''U'', and some characteristic length scale, ''α'':
:
Transport phenomena
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