Homogenization of reactive flows in porous media and competition between bulk and surface diffusion

Abstract

In this work, we study the convection and diffusion of a solute in a porous medium in the presence of a linear chemical reaction of adsorption/desorption on the pore surfaces. The mathematical model is a system of two coupled convection–diffusion equations, one in the bulk of the saturated fluid flowing in the porous medium, the other on the pore surface, at the interface with the solid part of the porous medium. The coupling takes place through a linear reaction term expressing the exchange of mass between the bulk concentration and the surface concentration. By a method of two-scale asymptotic expansion with drift, we obtain the homogenized problem in a moving frame. We rigorously justify our upscaling approach by using the notion of two-scale convergence with drift. Some 2D numerical tests are performed in order to study the effect of variations of the adsorption rate constant and surface molecular diffusion on the effective dispersion tensor.