Self-similar Turing patterns: An anomalous diffusion consequence.

In this work, we show that under specific anomalous diffusion conditions, chemical systems can produce well-ordered self-similar concentration patterns through diffusion-driven instability. We also find spiral patterns and patterns with mixtures of rotational symmetries. The type of anomalous diffusion discussed in this work, either subdiffusion or superdiffusion, is a consequence of the medium heterogeneity, and it is modeled through a space-dependent diffusion coefficient with a power-law functional form.

Fractal continuum model for tracer transport in a porous medium.

A model based on the fractal continuum approach is proposed to describe tracer transport in fractal porous media. The original approach has been extended to treat tracer transport and to include systems with radial and uniform flow, which are cases of interest in geoscience. The models involve advection due to the fluid motion in the fractal continuum and dispersion whose mathematical expression is taken from percolation theory. The resulting advective-dispersive equations are numerically solved for continuous and for pulse tracer injection. The tracer profile and the tracer breakthrough curve are evaluated and analyzed in terms of the fractal parameters. It has been found in this work that anomalous transport frequently appears, and a condition on the fractal parameter values to predict when sub- or superdiffusion might be expected has been obtained. The fingerprints of fractality on the tracer breakthrough curve in the explored parameter window consist of an early tracer breakthrough and long tail curves for the spherical and uniform flow cases, and symmetric short tailed curves for the radial flow case.

Transport in fractal media: an effective scale-invariant approach.

In this paper an advective-dispersion equation with scale-dependent coefficients is proposed for describing transport through fractals. This equation is obtained by imposing scale invariance and assuming that the porosity, the dispersion coefficient, and the velocity follow fractional power laws on the scale. The model incorporates the empirically found trends in highly heterogeneous media, regarding the dependence of the dispersivity on the scale and the dispersion coefficient on the velocity. We conclude that the presence of nontrivial fractal parameters produces anomalous dispersion, as expected, and that the presence of convective processes induces a reescalation in the concentration and shifts the tracer velocity to different values with respect to the nonfractal case.