Competitive exchange affects the transport of cations through soils wi
th negatively charged surfaces, and when more than 2 cations are prese
nt in the soil solution the effects are complex. There has been little
previous experimental work to examine these effects in ternary (or hi
gher order) cation systems. Cation transport experiments involving bot
h binary and ternary cation exchange were therefore carried out. Calci
um, which initially saturated both the solution and exchange phases of
the soil, was displaced by infiltrating solutions of Na+ and Ca2+, K and Ca2+, or K+ and Na+. In all cases, the equivalent fraction of Na or K+ in the inflowing solution was 0.5. The spatial distributions of
cation concentrations in both the solution and exchange phases were m
easured by destructive sampling. The Na+ front advanced into the soil
much more rapidly than K+ in all experiments because Ca2+-K+ exchange
was much stronger than Ca2+-Na+ exchange. In the ternary experiments (
Na+ and K+ displacing Ca2+), this led to the K+ and Na+ fronts being d
istinctly separate from each other, with the result that Ca2+-K+ excha
nge occurred in a background of almost constant Na+ concentration, and
Ca2+-Na+ exchange occurred in a background of constant (near-zero) K concentration. The presence of the highly competitive K+ had little i
nfluence on the transport of Na+, but the presence of Na+ did affect t
he distribution of K+. For experiments involving both binary and terna
ry exchange, the positions of the cation fronts and the shapes of the
cation distributions in both the solution and exchange phase could be
predicted using the appropriate binary exchange isotherms and approxim
ate analytical solutions published previously.