Tailor-made polymer tracers reveal the role of clay minerals on colloidal transport in carbonate media

PEG adsorption and transport was dependent on the availability of clay mineral surfaces and carbonate dissolution dynamics. In addition, PEG adsorption featured adsorption-desorption hysteresis which retained PEG mass on clay mineral surfaces. This resulted in different PEG transport for experiments conducted consecutively in the same porous medium. As such, PEG transport was reconstructed with a continuum-scale model parametrized by a Langmuir-type isotherm including hysteresis. Thus, we quantified the influence of exposed clay mineral surfaces on the transport of organic colloids in carbonate media. This renders PEG a suitable model colloid tracer for the assessment of clay surface exposition in porous media.