Langevin model for reactive transport in porous media

Abstract

Existing continuum models for reactive transport in porous media tend to overestimate the extent of solute mixing and mixing-controlled reactions because the continuum models treat both the mechanical and diffusive mixings as an effective Fickian process. Recently, we have proposed a phenomenological Langevin model for flow and transport in porous media [A. M. Tartakovsky, D. M. Tartakovsky, and P. Meakin, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 044502 (2008)]. In the Langevin model, the fluid flow in a porous continuum is governed by a combination of a Langevin equation and a continuity equation. Pore-scale velocity fluctuations, the source of mechanical dispersion, are represented by the white noise. The advective velocity (the solution of the Langevin flow equation) causes the mechanical dispersion of a solute. Molecular diffusion and sub-pore-scale Taylor-type dispersion are modeled by an effective stochastic advection-diffusion equation. Here, we propose a method for parameterization of the model for a synthetic porous medium, and we use the model to simulate multicomponent reactive transport in the porous medium. The detailed comparison of the results of the Langevin model with pore-scale and continuum (Darcy) simulations shows that: (1) for a wide range of Peclet numbers the Langevin model predicts the mass of reaction product more accurately than the Darcy model; (2) for small Peclet numbers predictions of both the Langevin and the Darcy models agree well with a prediction of the pore-scale model; and (3) the accuracy of the Langevin and Darcy model deteriorates with the increasing Peclet number but the accuracy of the Langevin model decreases more slowly than the accuracy of the Darcy model. These results show that the separate treatment of advective and diffusive mixing in the stochastic transport model is more accurate than the classical advection-dispersion theory, which uses a single effective diffusion coefficient (the dispersion coefficient) to describe both types of mixing.