The Arctic is a complex and vast environment studied by many interdisciplinary teams. In the talk we present our recent results on modeling coupled thermal, hydrological, and mechanical processes in porous soils as well as in the snow portions of the cryosphere. While many models exist for these processes in other contexts, the special features of the Arctic including the subfreezing...
Fluid flow through heterogeneous porous media is ubiquitous in a variety of subsurface engineering applications, including hydrology, geothermal energy production, hydrogen storage, and carbon dioxide sequestration. To efficiently study macroscopic fluid flow---as well as other macroscopic phenomena---in these systems, rigorous upscaling techniques can be employed to derive coarse-grained...
Predicting the fluid, thermal, and solutal transport in an evolving complex network of pores requires a fundamental description of the transport processes and their coupling to the underlying reaction chemistry. In a single pore, the complex dynamics under various competing timescales and solution-coupled boundary conditions give rise to nonmonotone behaviors in net fluid, thermal, and species...
CO2 storage in basaltic formations has emerged as a promising method for carbon sequestration due to its rapid mineralization rates, as demonstrated by several projects (e.g., CarbFix in Iceland, Wallula in the USA, and 44.01 in Oman). This study numerically investigates the efficacy of CO2 solution injection into basalt formations in the Republic of Korea. We implement geochemical reactions...
Mixed-dimensional coupled problems are characterized by coupled partial differential equations defined over domains of different dimensions. Examples include porous media with embedded inclusions. These problems arise in several applications ranging from geosciences to biomedicine. These models are computationally efficient thanks to the dimension reduction of the physical problem valid in...
We propose a mathematical relaxation method for nonlinear partial differential equations of convection-diffusion type discontinuous terms and computational applications [1,2]. We reformulate the underlying convection-diffusion problem as a system of hyperbolic equations coupled with relaxation terms. In contrast to existing literature on relaxation modeling (see, e.g., [3,4] and the references...
Recently, a new approach for simulating buoyant two-phase flow and transport in porous media, which is based on a coupled hyperbolic system, was proposed. This new scheme incorporates Darcy’s law by adding a source term to the isothermal Euler equations plus an extra equation for phase transport. The system allows for explicit computations and is solved in its hyperbolic form with a...
Despite being small and simple structured in comparison to their victims, virus particles have the potential to harm severly and even kill highly developed species such as humans. To face upcoming virus pandemics, detailed quantitative biophysical understanding of intracellular virus replication mechanisms is crucial. Unveiling the relationship of form and function will allow to determine...
We investigate multiphase flow in rough-walled fractures within stress-sensitive rocks, addressing the complexities introduced by rock deformation and fracture geometry. At the pore scale, we employ a Lattice-Boltzmann formulation to simulate flow under various conditions, parametrized by fracture aperture, joint roughness coefficient (JRC), contact angle, and viscosity ratio. The simulations...
In many poroelasticity applications, which involve the coupling of mechanics and fluid pressure in porous media, the effects of pressure are often restricted to a limited local region within the entire domain. Thus, solving the poroelasticity system across the entire domain can be computationally inefficient and possibly unnecessary. Alternatively, one can consider solving the full...
Expansive clays, such as bentonite, are involved in the design of engineered barriers for municipal and nuclear waste disposal. These materials are characterized by very low permeability, high swelling capacity, and self-healing properties, which ensure effective waste isolation and long-term stability under many different environmental conditions. Given the critical nature of their...
This presentation introduces a diffraction-based thermo-hydraulic-mechanical (THM) model for fracture propagation using a phase-field fracture (PFF) approach. The THM-PFF model integrates four primary solution variables—displacements, phase-field, pressure, and temperature—each governed by distinct principles: conservation of momentum (mechanics), a variational inequality (constrained...
Feedbacks between multiphase fluid flow and solid deformation are crucial for advancing many geotechnical applications. These feedbacks remain incompletely understood and challenging to represent, particularly in complex porous media with pores of varying sizes. Traditional hydraulic-mechanical coupled models often struggle to accurately represent hybrid systems that include both solid-free...
In modeling flows of shear-thinning polymers in porous media, it is usually assumed that the polymer is uniformly mixed in the aqueous phase in space and time. However, this is rarely the case after an initial period of flow through the porous media. Even though there does not exist any theory of how the non-uniformity in mixing develops in time and space, we propose a modeling approach to...
