A general method for simulating reactive dissolution in carbonate rocks with arbitrary geometry

Abstract

The two-scale continuum model is widely used in simulating the reactive dissolution process and predicting the optimum injection rate for carbonate reservoir acidizing treatment. The numerical methods of this model are currently based on structured grids, which are not applicable for complicated geometries. In this study, a general numerical scheme for simulating a reactive flow problem on both structured and unstructured grids is presented based on the finite volume method (FVM). The convection and diffusion terms involved in the reactive flow model are discretized by using the upwind scheme and two-point flux approximation (TPFA), respectively. The location of the centroid node inside each control volume is moved by using an optimization algorithm to make the connections with the surrounding elements as orthogonal as possible, which systematically improves the accuracy of the TPFA scheme. Additionally, in order to avoid the computational complexity resulting from the discretization of the non-linear term, the mass balance equation is only discretized in the spatial domain to get a set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). These ODEs are coupled with the reaction equations and then solved using the numerical algorithm on ODEs. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are studied by comparing the results obtained from the proposed numerical method with previous experimental and numerical results. This comparison indicates that, compared with the previous methods, the proposed method predicts the wormhole structure more accurately. Finally, the presented method is used to check the effect of the domain geometry, and it is found that the geometry of the flow domain has no effect on the optimum injection velocity, but the radial domain requires a larger breakthrough volume than the linear domain when other parameters are fixed.