Effect of Reactive Surface Areas Associated with Different Particle Shapes on Chemical-Dissolution Front Instability in Fluid-Saturated Porous Rocks

Abstract

In this article, the effect of reactive surface areas associated with different particle shapes on the reactive infiltration instability in a fluid-saturated porous medium is investigated through analytically deriving the dimensionless pore-fluid pressure-gradient of a coupled system between porosity, pore-fluid flow and reactive chemical-species transport within two idealized porous media consisting of spherical and cubic grains respectively. Compared with the critical dimensionless pore-fluid pressure-gradient of the coupled system, the derived dimensionless pore-fluid pressure-gradient can be used to assess the instability of a chemical dissolution front within the fluid-saturated porous medium. The related theoretical analysis has demonstrated that (1) since the shape coefficient of spherical grains is greater than that of cubic grains, the chemical system consisting of spherical grains is more unstable than that consisting of cubic grains, and (2) the instability likelihood of a natural porous medium, which is comprised of irregular grains, is smaller than that of an idealized porous medium, which is comprised of regular spherical grains. To simulate the complicated morphological evolution of a chemical dissolution front in the case of the chemical dissolution system becoming supercritical, a numerical procedure is proposed for solving this kind of problem. The related numerical results have demonstrated that the reactive surface area associated with different particle shapes can have a significant influence on the morphological evolution of an unstable chemical-dissolution front within fluid-saturated porous rocks.