dispersiviteit
Dispersiviteit is a concept in hydrogeology describing how solutes spread as they move through a porous medium. The spreading arises from two main processes: mechanical dispersion, caused by velocity variations at the pore scale, and molecular diffusion, driven by concentration gradients. Together they determine how a contaminant plume or a tracer plume broadens as it advects with groundwater.
In many transport models, especially the one-dimensional advection-dispersion equation, the spreading is described by a dispersion
Dispersivity is scale-dependent: laboratory measurements on packed columns yield small values (millimetres to centimetres), whereas field
Measurement and application involve tracer tests, column experiments, or fitting observed concentration breakthrough curves to transport