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Evaporative salinization of the agricultural soil is a chronic problem in arid, semiarid and coastal regions worldwide. As a shallow subsurface issue, it is strongly influenced by the free-flow (henceforth, FF) and porous-media (henceforth, PM) flow and transport processes. In specific, it is mainly affected by the mass, momentum and energy exchange between the FF and the PM regions. Furthermore, salt precipitation in such systems is strongly determined by the interaction between different dissolved ionic species. In the scope of this work, we extend the REV-scale coupled FF-PM model concept for salinization proposed by Jambhekar et al. (Transp Porous Media, 2015), to describe reactive transport of ionic species $$\text {Na}^+$$ , $$\text {Cl}^-$$ and $$\text {I}^-$$ and mixed salt precipitation (here, NaCl and NaI). In the first part of our numerical analysis, we illustrate precipitation behavior of NaCl using equilibrium and kinetic approaches. Both approaches are found to be in good agreement with experimental observations. However, in the literature it is often discussed that for mixed salt systems found in the nature, the equilibrium precipitation-dissolution assumption is not easily justifiable. Therefore, in the second part of our numerical analysis, we extend the kinetic approach to describe mixed salt precipitation in an NaCl-NaI system and compare it with the equilibrium precipitation approach. Our numerical analysis indicate that the simulation results for these approaches are very similar and analogous with the phenomenological explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract.: The pressure-driven growth model is considered, describing the motion of a foam front through an oil reservoir during foam improved oil recovery, foam being formed as gas advances into an initially liquid-filled reservoir. In the model, the foam front is represented by a set of so-called 'material points' that track the advance of gas into the liquid-filled region. According to the model, the shape of the foam front is prone to develop concave sharply curved concavities, where the orientation of the front changes rapidly over a small spatial distance: these are referred to as 'concave corners'. These concave corners need to be propagated differently from the material points on the foam front itself. Typically the corner must move faster than those material points, otherwise spurious numerical artifacts develop in the computed shape of the front. A propagation rule or 'speed up' rule is derived for the concave corners, which is shown to be sensitive to the level of anisotropy in the permeability of the reservoir and also sensitive to the orientation of the corners themselves. In particular if a corner in an anisotropic reservoir were to be propagated according to an isotropic speed up rule, this might not be sufficient to suppress spurious numerical artifacts, at least for certain orientations of the corner. On the other hand, systems that are both heterogeneous and anisotropic tend to be well behaved numerically, regardless of whether one uses the isotropic or anisotropic speed up rule for corners. This comes about because, in the heterogeneous and anisotropic case, the orientation of the corner is such that the 'correct' anisotropic speed is just very slightly less than the 'incorrect' isotropic one. The anisotropic rule does however manage to keep the corner very slightly sharper than the isotropic rule does. Graphical abstract: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaporative salinization of soil is a common issue observed in arid and coastal regions. This process is driven by mass, momentum and energy exchange between the porous medium and the free-flow region. To analyze such coupled systems, we present a representative elementary volume-scale model concept for coupling non-isothermal multi-phase compositional porous-media flow and single-phase compositional laminar free flow. Our numerical results illustrate evaporation behavior from a porous medium initially saturated with NaCl solution, manifesting its influence on dissolved salt distribution, salt precipitation and porous-media properties. We show that the new model is capable to capture the evaporation physics for different stages of evaporative salinization and compare the numerical results to two different experimental datasets: (1) cumulative mass loss of water and dissolved salt during stage-1 of saline water evaporation and (2) evaporation rate for different stages of evaporative salinization. In addition, influence of the initial salt concentration on the saline water saturation vapor pressure and transition to stage-2 evaporation are analyzed and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clinical use of tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes for the treatment of solid tumours is hindered by the need to obtain large and fresh tumour fractions, which is often not feasible in patients with unresectable tumours or recurrent metastases. Here we show that circulating tumour-reactive lymphocytes (cTRLs) can be isolated from peripheral blood at high yield and purity via microfluidic immunomagnetic cell sorting, allowing for comprehensive downstream analyses of these rare cells. We observed that CD103 is strongly expressed by the isolated cTRLs, and that in mice with subcutaneous tumours, tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes isolated from the tumours and rapidly expanded CD8 + CD103 + cTRLs isolated from blood are comparably potent and respond similarly to immune checkpoint blockade. We also show that CD8 + CD103 + cTRLs isolated from the peripheral blood of patients and co-cultured with tumour cells dissociated from their resected tumours resulted in the enrichment of interferon-γ-secreting cell populations with T-cell-receptor clonotypes substantially overlapping those of the patients' tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes. Therapeutically potent cTRLs isolated from peripheral blood may advance the clinical development of adoptive cell therapies., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)