Heterogeneities induced into a porous medium by reactive flow as investigated on the pore-scale

Project Leader: Irina Sin
Staff: Stephan Matthai (University of Melbourne), Allan Leal/ (ETH Zurich)
Collaborators: Stephan Matthai (Infrastructure Engineering) , Allan Leal (ETH Zurich)
Primary Contact: Hossein Agheshlui (hossein.agheshlui@unimelb.edu.au)
Keywords: computational chemistry; fluid mechanics; numerical modelling; reactive transport; solid-liquid systems
Disciplines: Infrastructure Engineering
Domains:

Modeling coupled flow and reactive transport is relevant for CO2 sequestration, EOR and groundwater contamination. Chemical reactions such as mineral dissolution and precipitation can alter the pore structure inducing changes of the fluid-solid interface, porosity and permeability. These affect the flow through the porous medium. Modeling such coupled physical processes at the pore-scale is essential to enhance understanding of experimental results and the determination of properties needed for field-scale simulation of reactive transport processes.

This work aims at studying heterogeneous chemical reactions and their impact on pore structure evolution, fluid-solid interaction, and fluid flow and transport properties. It becomes possible via a new finite-element finite-volume multiphysics simulator based on the CSMP++ C++ library. Flow will be coupled with fluid-fluid and fluid-solid reactions using the reactive transport software Reaktoro (GEMS, Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland + ETHZ). The simulation results will facilitate the analysis and development of mathematical models for upscaling the studied processes to the continuum scale.