Brine

About: Brine is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6542 publications have been published within this topic receiving 76741 citations.

Brine percolation and the transport properties of sea ice

Abstract: Sea ice is distinguished from many other porous composites, such as sandstones or bone, in that its microstructure and bulk material properties can vary dramatically over a small temperature range. For brine-volume fractions below a critical value of about 5%, which corresponds to a critical temperature of about −5°C for salinity of 5 ppt, columnar sea ice is effectively impermeable to fluid transport. For higher brine volumes, the brine phase becomes connected and the sea ice is permeable, allowing transport of brine, sea water, nutrients, biomass and heat through the ice. Over the past several years it has been found that brine transport is fundamental to such processes as sea-ice production through freezing of flooded ice surfaces, the enhancement of thermal and salt fluxes through sea ice, nutrient replenishment for sea-ice algal communities, and to sea-ice remote sensing. Motivated by these observations, recently we have shown how percolation theory can be used to understand the critical behavior of fluid transport in sea ice. We applied a percolation model developed for compressed powders of large polymer particles with much smaller metal particles, which explains the observed behavior of the fluid permeability in the critical temperature regime, as well as Antarctic data on surface flooding and algal growth rates. Moreover, the connectedness properties of the brine phase play a significant role in the microwave signature of sea ice through its effective complex permittivity and surface flooding. Here we review our recent results on brine percolation and its role in understanding the fluid and electromagnetic transport properties of sea ice. We also briefly report on measurements of percolation we made on first-year sea ice during the winter 1999 Mertz Glacier Polynya Experiment.

Toxicity of Brine Water from Oil Wells

Abstract: Studies of the median toxicity thresholds for 10 species of fish in brine wastes from a single oil well showed a range of the thresholds from 4.3 to 11.2 percent of the original brine by volume. A similar study on 10 kinds of invertebrates revealed a range of thresholds from 1.8 to 8.7 percent. Thresholds were expressed as percentage volume of the original waste since the brine contained large amounts of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium as well as chloride ions. However, computations of hypothetical combinations of chlorides in the brine indicated sodium chloride to be present in such proportions as to be most toxic. Median toxicity thresholds were determined also for six species of fish and five kinds of invertebrates in tap water and sodium chloride. A comparison of these thresholds with those in brine wastes, expressed as p.p.m. hypothetical sodium chloride, revealed that three species of fish (plains killifish, gambusia, and the black bullhead) could withstand more sodium chloride in...