Presentation materials
Injection of anthropogenic carbon dioxide into deep geological formations requires one or more trapping mechanisms to keep the CO2 contained in the injection formation. The most stable of these trapping mechanisms is mineral trapping where the injected carbon is ultimately trapped in solid form via precipitation of carbonates. While mineral trapping in most sedimentary formations is...
Density-driven flows in porous media are frequently encountered in natural systems and arise from the gravitational instabilities introduced by fluid density gradients. They have significant economic and environmental impacts, and numerical modelling is often used to predict the behaviour of these flows for risk assessment, reservoir characterisation or management. However, modelling...
The goal of the presentation is to demonstrate examples of modeling of the Darcy-Brinkman (DB) equation, which can be used to describe nonlinear dynamical flow in fractured-porous media. The DB equation is presented as a surrogate system of four ordinary differential equations, including a kinetic component related to fluid velocity, pressure, and a gravitational potential. The results of...
Natural porous systems, such as soil, membranes, and biological tissues comprise disordered structures characterized by dead-end pores connected to a network of percolating channels. The release and dispersion of particles, solutes, and microorganisms from such features is key for a broad range of environmental and medical applications including soil remediation, drug delivery and filtration....
One of the most important problems related to the modeling of fluid flow in natural porous media is accounting for their heterogeneous structure, which occurs on various spatial scales. A typical and widespread example of heterogeneous porous media is fractured rocks. While the volume of the fractures is negligible, their presence significantly alters the mechanical and hydraulic properties of...
In 2002, Brian published his seminal review paper that concisely and elegantly summarises the key challenges and advancements in the characterisation of flow and transport processes in fractured geological formations [1]. 20 years later, much progress has been made but many of the challenges that Brian outlined still remain, most notably how to model flow and transport processes effectively,...
The characterization of aquifer systems on a regional scale is one of the main challenges in the study of groundwater today. This is addressed, usually, from the implementation of hydrogeological models. However, these have implicit uncertainties associated with the lack of hydrogeological information [1,2]. In this study, a numerical hydrogeological model was implemented at a regional scale...
We study the upscaling and large scale modeling of anomalous transport in three-dimensional random fracture networks. Our approach is based on the continuous time random walk (CTRW) approach, which was pioneered in this context by Brian Berkowitz in his 1997 paper in Phys. Rev. Letters on Anomalous Transport in Random Fracture Networks. Based on detailed flow and particle tracking simulations,...
During fluid-rock interaction, nano-porous coatings can build up on mineral surfaces. Such coatings often form as result of coupled dissolution-precipitation reactions and are thought to impede reaction rates. While this effect is widely recognized, a complete mechanistic description of the way coatings impact mineral reaction rates has not yet been developed. In this study, we present a...
The importance of karst reservoirs for water resources, and their complexity in terms of structural properties and hydraulic responses, require a better understanding of the formation and location of conducts in these systems, in particular for chalk reservoirs. For this purpose, we conduct laboratory experiments of acid solutions injection in chalk core samples using a homemade experimental...
Darcy scale transport in porous media ranges between Fickian and non-Fickian according to the medium conductivity layout, which ranges between homogenous and heterogeneous. Yet, evidence shows that preferential flows that funnel and bypass even areas with high conductivity occur in heterogeneous and homogenous cases. We model the Darcy scale transport using a 2D conductivity field ranging from...
