Abstract
Pore-scale modeling and simulation of reactive flow in porous media has a range of diverse applications, and poses a number of research challenges. It is known that the morphology of a porous medium has significant influence on the local flow rate, which can have a substantial impact on the rate of chemical reactions. While there are a large number of papers and software tools dedicated to simulating either fluid flow in 3D computerized tomography (CT) images or reactive flow using porenetwork models, little attention to date has been focused on the pore-scale simulation of sorptive transport in 3D CT images, which is the specific focus of this paper. Here we first present an algorithm for the simulation of such reactive flows directly on images, which is implemented in a sophisticated software package. We then use this software to present numerical results in two resolved geometries, illustrating the importance of pore-scale simulation and the flexibility of our software package.
Highlights
Understanding and controlling reactive flow in porous media is important for a number of environmental and industrial applications, including oil recovery, fluid filtration and purification, combustion and hydrology [26, 32]
We have presented an algorithm for solving solute transport at the pore-scale within a resolved porous medium, with reversible surface adsorption at the pore wall
The system of equations comprise the NS equations and a CD equation, with Robin boundary conditions coupled to an ordinary differential equation (ODE) accounting for the surface reactions
Summary
Understanding and controlling reactive flow in porous media is important for a number of environmental and industrial applications, including oil recovery, fluid filtration and purification, combustion and hydrology [26, 32]. A number of academic as well as commercial software tools, capable of processing 3D computerized tomography (CT) images in addition to virtually generating porous media, are available, for example Avizo, GeoDict and Ingrain [3,12,16] Most of those software tools have the additional ability of simulating two-phase immiscible flow at the pore-scale directly on a computational domain obtained through the segmentation of 3D CT images, often using the lattice Boltzmann (LB), the level set or volume of fluid methods. The literature and computational tools examining full 3D pore-scale reactive flow where the reactions occur at the pore wall (surface reactions) is sparse The majority of such existing studies and available numerical simulation packages use pore-network mathematical models (see, for example, [23,30] and literature therein), for which the geometry needs to be converted into an idealized series of connected pores and throats to represent the porous medium. In particular the software package has the ability to solve the systems of equations modeling colloidal reactive transport on a geometrical domain obtained directly through imaging techniques, such as computerized tomography, which allows for a very accurate spatial description of the computational domain
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