Deviations from Darcy's Law in Saturated Clays

Abstract

Abstract Atmospheric contamination causes an error in the conventional use of air‐water menisci and air bubbles in capillary tubes for measuring flow rates through clays. This error gives rise to spurious deviations from the conventional criterion for Darcy's law. Data are presented which show the error can be of sufficient magnitude to account for the deviations from Darcy's law in much of the published data on confined clay samples. The error is negligible compared with the deviations in the published data on unconfined clay and sandstone samples.