Numerical investigation of homogenized Stokes–Nernst–Planck–Poisson systems

Abstract

We consider charged transport within a porous medium, which at the pore scale can be described by the non-stationary Stokes–Nernst–Planck–Poisson (SNPP) system. We state three different homogenization results using the method of two-scale convergence. In addition to the averaged macroscopic equations, auxiliary cell problems are solved in order to provide closed-form expressions for effective coefficients. Our aim is to study numerically the convergence of the models for vanishing microstructure, i. e., the behavior for \(\varepsilon \rightarrow 0\), where \(\varepsilon \) is the characteristic ratio between pore diameter and size of the porous medium. To this end, we propose a numerical scheme capable of solving the fully coupled microscopic SNPP system and also the corresponding averaged systems. The discretization is performed fully implicitly in time using mixed finite elements in two space dimensions. The averaged models are evaluated using simulation results and their approximation errors in terms of \(\varepsilon \) are estimated numerically.