Modeling chemical reactions in porous media: a review

Abstract

First, different porous media theories are presented. Some approaches are based on the classical mixture theory for fluids introduced in the 1960s by Truesdell and Coworkers. One of the first researchers who extended the theory to porous media (thus mixtures containing at least one solid constituent) and also accounting for chemical reactions was Bowen. Another important branch of porous media theory goes back to Biot. In the beginning, he dealt with classical geotechnical problems and set up his model empirically. Mathematicians often use reaction–diffusion equations which are limited in comparison with continuum models by several restrictive assumptions and very often only applicable to special problems. In this paper, the focus lies on approaches based on the mixture theory which incorporate chemical reactions. Different strategies to describe the chemical potential for mixtures are presented, and different opinions about the exploitation of the second law of thermodynamics for mixtures are put forward. Finally, several works of different types including chemical reactions in porous media are summarized.