Abstract
Computational microfluidics for geosciences is the third leg of the scientific strategy that includes microfluidic experiments and high-resolution imaging for deciphering coupled processes in geological porous media. This modeling approach solves the fundamental equations of continuum mechanics in the exact geometry of porous materials. Computational microfluidics intends to complement and augment laboratory experiments. Although the field is still in its infancy, the recent progress in modeling multiphase flow and reactive transport at the pore-scale has shed new light on the coupled mechanisms occurring in geological porous media already. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art computational microfluidics for geosciences, the open challenges, and the future trends.
Highlights
Since their appearance in the early eighties, microfluidic experiments have revolutionized the knowledge in porous media research
In just a few decades, microfluidics has become an indispensable tool in geosciences to decipher the complex mechanisms that occur in porous systems and the discipline keeps improving
Computational Fluid Dynamics In Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the Navier-Stokes equations are solved by discretizing the spatial differential operators on an Eulerian grid using techniques such as the finite difference method (FDM), the finite volume method (FVM), or the finite element method (FEM) (Ferziger and Peric, 2002)
Summary
Since their appearance in the early eighties, microfluidic experiments have revolutionized the knowledge in porous media research. The enormous progress in high-resolution numerical simulation of complex flow and high-performance computing techniques, makes it possible to perform routinely computational microfluidics for single-phase flows on domains that reach the size of a Representative Elementary Volume (Roman et al, 2016) It heavily relies on advanced and modern approaches for simulating fluid dynamics, computational microfluidics for geosciences has its own challenges related to the complexity of natural systems including the heterogeneity of geological porous media, the evolving porous microstructure along with geochemical processes, and the complex description of interfacial phenomena at the mineral surfaces (Meakin and Tartakovsky, 2009). We summarize the main advances in modeling multiphase flow (section 3.1) and reactive transport (section 3.2), and we discuss future lines of research
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