A review of a selection of papers describing the theory of transport in anisotropic porous media

It is now generally accepted that the dispersion length, as defined in the classical advection-dispersion equation, is scale dependent. This report collects together and reviews some of the seminal papers in which have appeared the models and techniques that have led to our present understanding of solute transport in spatially stochastic media. Thus we examine the early work of Taylor on diffusion, the work of Saffman on capillaries, through to the more recent contributions of Dagan and Gelhar which regard the advective-dispersion equation as having stochastic parameters. The reports discuss these papers highlighting the physical arguments and in places deriving some of the more obscure results. This work is carried out by a cost-sharing contract with the European Atomic Energy Community for a research programme on Management, Storage and Radioactive waste disposal. 34 refs