The small grains in a bidisperse porous medium have the greater influence on
the permeability, while the large grains are more effective in dispersing chemical
tracers. We compute the dispersion induced by a dilute array of large spheres in
a Brinkman medium whose permeability is determined by the radii and volume
fraction of the small spheres. The effective diffusivity contains a purely hydrodynamic
contribution proportional to Ua1ϕ1 and an
O(Ua1ϕ1 ln
(Ua1/D)) contribution from
the mass transfer boundary layers near the spheres. Here, U is the mean velocity in
the medium, a1 and ϕ1 are the radii and volume
fraction of the large spheres and D is
the molecular diffusivity. The boundary-layer dispersion is small when the Brinkman
screening length κ (or square root of permeability) is much smaller than a1, but is
important for κ[ges ]O(a1). Experimental results for the dispersion due to flow through
a bidisperse packed bed are reported and compared with the theoretical predictions.
In addition to its application to bidisperse porous media, the present calculation
allows an extension of Koch & Brady's (1985) analysis of monodisperse fixed beds to
include higher-order terms in the expansion for small particle volume fraction.