Reactive Transport Modeling with a Coupled OpenFOAM®-PHREEQC Platform

Abstract

Reactive transport modeling has established itself as a key player to analyze sophisticated hydro-geochemical interactions that occur over spatiotemporal scales on par with subsurface applications. In this paper, we benchmarked a new reactive transport package—porousMedia4Foam at the continuum scale considering complex and well-established cases available in the reactive transport modeling community. porousMedia4Foam was born by the successful coupling of two open-source packages—OpenFOAM® and PHREEQC. The flow governing equations, transport of species and the evolution of porous media properties are handled by OpenFOAM®, whereas the geochemistry is exclusively handled by PHREEQC. We further demonstrated the capability of using porousMedia4Foam to investigate reactive transport processes considering unstructured meshes. As porousMedia4Foam is an open-source package with included benefits to account for reactive transport processes occurring at various scales—pore, hybrid, and Darcy scales, we believe that porousMedia4Foam opens a new dimension to analyze reactive transport physics for various intriguing subsurface applications.