Mechanism of Wettability Hysteresis in Natural Soils

Because models of subsurface flow and transport depend on the contact angles made by the air/water and waste liquid/water interfaces with soil and rock surfaces, accurate knowledge of the wettability of subsurface systems is necessary. Sessile drop contact angles were measured on dry rock surfaces and on the same rock surfaces immersed in a second fluid. Quartz slides and cut rock faces that had been leveled and polished served as representative surfaces for silica sand, talc, kerogen containing shales, bituminous coal, and mineralized carbon. For several carbon-containing materials, contact angles are reversed from near 170 degrees when water is the receding fluid to less than 70 degrees if water is the advancing fluid. However, some mineral soils do not display wetting reversal. This work seeks to explain the mechanisms of the wetting order hysteresis. Utilizing an aqueous 0.01 M NaCl solution, glycerol, 1-bromonapthalene, and diidomethane as probe fluids, contact angle values are assessed with the method of van Oss et al. (1988) to determine the surface energy components of each type of soil. The quartz mineral surface energy has a large polar component and the calculated quartz surface energy does not depend on the wetting history of the slide. However, the magnitudes of the surface energy components of the carbon-containing materials change depending on the wetting history, indicating that the nature of the surface is altered by the surrounding fluid. The presence of wetting order hysteresis may contribute to the heterogeneous fluid distributions found at many waste liquid sites. When soil is known to contain carbon, some knowledge of the wetting history is necessary to predict the contact angle and thus the transport behavior.