Comparison of numerical methods for reactive transport modeling in porous media

Thibault Faney

IFPEN, Parigi (Francia)

Thursday 16th June 2016

10:30:00

Sala Consiglio al VII Piano presso Dipartimento di Matematica, Politecnico di Milano

Reactive transport numerical models [1] are used to predict temperature and pressure variations, brine and gas phases displacement, and chemical effects of gas-water-rock interactions in porous media. One of the main challenges of these models is to accurately represent the coupling between transport phenomena and mass transfer occurring in sub-surface porous media. In a previous work [2], we have introduced a new mathematical formulation to handle the phase appearance and disappearance issues associated with multi-component, multi-phase flow combined with stoichiometric mass transfer. In this work, we compare our formulation with an implementation of a splitting scheme between flow, transport and chemical reactions [3] on a larger range of benchmark problems associated with complex chemical equilibria. Both formulations are implemented in a three-dimensional multi-phase flow code using the HPC numerical framework Arcane [4]. We discuss the gain in robustness, performance and accuracy for the fully implicit method relative to the more traditional splitting algorithm. References: [1] C.I. Steefel et al., Reactive transport modeling: An essential tool and a new research approach for the Earth sciences, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 240, 539–55, 2005. [2] T.Faney, A.Michel and Q.L.Nguyen, A mathematical formulation for reactive transport in porous media adapted to CO2 sequestration, SIAM 2015 Computational Geosciences. [3] C. de Dieuleveult, J.Erhel and M.Kern, A global strategy for solving reactive transport equations, Journal of Computational Physics, 228 6395-6410, 2009. [4] Grospellier, G. et al., The Arcane Development Framework, POOSC’09, Genova, Italy, 2009 contatto: luca.bonaventura@polimi.it