Numerical Simulation of Multi-Phase Multi-Component Reactive Flow in Porous Media

Abstract

In this thesis we develop a multi-component multi-phase reactive transport simulator to facilitate the investigation of a large variety of phenomena in porous media including component transport, diffusion, microbiological growth and decay, cell attachment and detachment and phase exchange. The coupled problem is solved using operator splitting approach. This approach enables us to use higher-order schemes and reduce numerical diffusion, which can result in an overestimation of phase exchange and reaction processes. Furthermore, this approach allows a flexible adaptation of the solution strategy to the concrete problem. We conduct an in-depth comparison of the fully-coupled and splitting approaches in order to derive criteria for the most efficient scheme depending on the relative importance of advection, diffusion and reaction.