Presentation materials
This study introduces a novel hybrid approach combining multi-objective optimization and machine learning to optimize an integrated carbon capture and storage (CCS) system. The method simultaneously addresses both reservoir and facility aspects, solving pipe flow and Darcy’s law in porous media based on dynamic nodal analysis. Using CoFlow, an integrated geoenergy system modeling tool...
Shale gas has begun to progressively replace traditional oil and natural gas as a new significant energy source due to the gradual advancement of shale gas exploration and development technology. Exploration and extraction of shale gas depend on the adsorption and free-state characterization of gases in nanoporous shale. Although the majority of current research focuses mostly on the...
Heat transfer in porous media involves all aspects of production and life, and the porous media has fractal characteristics. Based on the porous media REV (Representative Elementary Volume) description analysis method, two microphysical models of porous media were established: the heat transfer model of hollow skeleton and the heat transfer model of solid particle. Combined with fractal...
DuMux (https://dumux.org/) is a general simulation framework (written in C++) with a focus on finite volume discretization methods, model coupling for multi-physics applications, and flow and transport applications in porous media. Its core applications are single and multiphase flow applications in porous media on the Darcy scale, embedded network and fracture models, and free-flow porous...
Evaluating CO2 performance in geological carbon storage requires the use of multiple simulation models. The Virtual Learning Environment for Geological Carbon Storage (VIRGO) translates technical outputs from numerical simulations and machine learning (ML) models into actionable insights for developers, operators, regulators, and stakeholders. By incorporating various modules from the...
Through a multiscale approach, this study highlights the importance of controlling CO2 mobility for the effective subsurface use and sequestration of anthropogenic CO2 in depleted formations, which not only improves oil recovery but also increases CO2 storage efficiency—an essential step toward achieving a zero-carbon economy. In this study, novel techniques were developed by injecting CO2...
Solute mixing in porous media is a fundamental process that controls various industrial and environmental processes. Since pore-scale flows are typically steady and laminar, solute mixing was thought to be largely driven by molecular diffusion. However, recent studies have shown that chaotic advection can emerge from 3D flow paths through the porosity [1, 2], strongly enhancing mixing as...
Quantifying uncertainties associated with fault-related leakage is a significant challenge to ensure safe and efficient storage of
Hydrogen has emerged as a promising alternative for sustainable energy and plays a pivotal role in the transition from fossil fuels to green energy. With this growing reliance on hydrogen, the demand for efficient and scalable energy storage solutions has become increasingly critical. Among the various methods available, underground hydrogen storage (UHS) stands out as a cost-effective...
Abstract
This research investigates the effectiveness of flue gas geo-sequestration in enhancing oil recovery (EOR) within fractured carbonate reservoirs. Utilizing the Eclipse E300 compositional reservoir simulator, the study evaluates various gas injection scenarios, specifically focusing on flue gas and CO2. Key reservoir characteristics, including pressure, temperature, porosity, and...
Hydrogen behavior in tight rock formations will define the success of many subsurface operations, including geologic hydrogen production and seasonal storage. Understanding the fundamental mechanisms governing transport within these systems necessitates the application of advanced experimental techniques capable of nanoscale observation under dynamic and high-pressure conditions. In the...
This study focuses on geothermal energy utilization through multi-objective optimization of Isopropanol-Acetone-Hydrogen chemical heat pump (IAH-CHP). In this paper, IAH-CHP coupled with medium-low temperature geothermal heat source simulation was constructed. China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, was used as a case study to highlight environmental benefits. Comparative analysis was...
Modeling the process of multiphase flow through porous media is an essential task as it is involved in many mitigation technologies, including CO2 geological storage, hydrogen storage, and fuel cells. To study these multiphase flow processes, scientists can utilize micro-CT scanners with synchrotron sources to image the rock pores in a nanometer-scale spatial resolution while recreating the in...
Porous ceramics have diverse applications, including water filtration, heat transfer, catalyst support, and liquid evaporation. They are also essential as water-sealing residential tiles, where understanding water imbibition is crucial for improving tile coating quality. This study focuses on modeling water imbibition using Richards' equation, a complex nonlinear partial differential equation...
Hydrogen geologic storage offers significant potential to enhance energy sustainability, but optimizing its storage remains a challenge. Key to addressing this challenge is understanding the thermodynamic processes within mineral nanopores in underground formations. These nanopores present unique opportunities and challenges due to their complex surface chemistry and interactions with...
Effective underground hydrogen storage in porous rocks requires handling cycles of storage and withdrawal while minimising residual gas saturation, which represents an irrecoverable loss of stored gas and significantly impacts economic feasibility. We will present our recent results on numerical and experimental developments focusing on micromodel systems to investigate these phenomena. The...
The increase in global energy demand, along with the pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels, has sent a clear message to use clean and renewable energy sources. The use of hydrogen gas, along with other renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy, is the most promising way to provide sufficient energy [1]-[3]. Hydrogen is the most abundant element on Earth and can achieve a...
There is an immediate need for carbon sequestration coupled with a need for low-cost, continuous monitoring, and real-time awareness of the saturation plume to prevent leakage. We seek to maximize plume prediction accuracy with economical and reliable monitoring strategies. Multilevel pressure monitoring is a monitoring scheme shown to be effective in determining the height and footprint of a...
Petroleum reservoirs are important porous media, and their internal permeability plays a crucial role in their oil storage and transportation capabilities. After years of rolling development using multiple displacement methods, major oil fields around the world have shown different changes in reservoir pore structure characteristics, clay mineral composition, and permeability. By...
Geologic carbon sequestration (GCS) as a greenhouse gas mitigation method is reliant on the long-term retention of carbon dioxide within reservoir storage zones. During the subsurface migration of carbon dioxide in highly homogeneous formations, fluids tend to quickly migrate upwards and accumulate at the top of the storage interval. These accumulations are therefore dependent on the surface...
The silica-water interface is well studied given its ubiquity in geochemical environments. Many force fields have been developed for both silica and water independently, however, little attention has been given to interaction parameters developed specifically for the interface. As a consequence, simulations continue to use traditional “mixing rules” to calculate silica-water Lennard-Jones...
Pore Network Models (PNM) are an important approach to flow simulation in porous media, alongside direct numerical simulation and Lattice Boltzmann Models. Those methods are usually applied in the context of digital rocks, in which images of rock samples are used to extract the geometric information used in the simulation. When compared to the other approaches, PNM is considered to be a more...
Reactive transport simulations play a crucial role in advancing our understanding of geochemical subsurface processes, such as modeling geological carbon sequestration and hydrogen storage. These simulations typically employ mass conservation equations to represent chemical reactions and transport phenomena in porous media, which can occur through dispersive/diffusive or advective mechanisms....
Mineral dissolution is a key geologic process that can control many natural processes and human activities. Depending on the interplay between advection, diffusion, and reaction rates, mineral dissolution can produce various dissolution patterns, such as wormholing and uniform dissolution. The resulting changes in pore structure directly influence the flow field, which in turn control solute...
This paper comprehensively investigates the elastic behavior of fluid-saturated porous media, particularly under varied stress and pore pressures. We use a Linear Superposition Method (LSM) to quantify stress distribution and effective bulk moduli within a synthetic micropore model under both drained and undrained conditions. Our results reveal a significant nonlinear stiffening effect,...
Hydrogen storage in salt caverns offers a promising solution for large-scale energy storage; however, biogeochemical reactions involving hydrogen, minerals, and microbial communities can compromise hydrogen quality. The Salado Formation, a salt cavern located in west Texas and southeastern New Mexico, is composed of evaporites such as halite and interbedded potash salts like polyhalite,...
Abstract. Shales are abundant source rocks for natural gas in sedimentary basins, and gas recovery from shales has gained increased attention given the global rise in energy demand. Despite advancements in horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and depressurization to atmospheric conditions, recovery rates for natural gas from shales remain limited to 20-60%. This is primarily due to the...
Supercritical CO₂ (scCO₂) viscosification has broad practical application prospects in carbon sequestration, geothermal development, and fracturing. Hydrocarbon-based oligomers are considered to have significant potential for industrial application. However, the viscosification mechanism of hydrocarbon-based oligomer-scCO₂ remains unclear. This study employs molecular dynamics(MD) simulations...
This study addresses the challenge of modeling tracer dispersion through porous media, applying the Galerkin Physics-Informed Neural Network (Galerkin PINN) approach. The Galerkin PINN method has been systematically evaluated by comparing its results against both analytical solutions and numerical simulations using a Finite Element Method. In this work, experiments were conducted using Berea...
The near-wellbore region plays a crucial role in determining production and injection conditions, directly impacting operational efficiency. Skin, as a dimensionless parameter representing wellbore damage or stimulation, critically alters petrophysical properties and thus injectivity. The injection of reactive fluids, such as supercritical CO2, poses additional challenges due to its capability...
Gas-driven multiphase drainage in porous media is pivotal for enhanced oil recovery, groundwater remediation, and CO₂ and hydrogen storage, where gas compressibility has the potential to stabilize both viscous and capillary fingering instabilities. While recent studies have demonstrated the role of compressibility in delaying fingering onset and severity in non-porous systems, its influence...
Hydrogen has gained interest in recent years as a clean energy source and form of energy storage to support renewables. Porous underground reservoirs (e.g., saline aquifers and depleted gas reservoirs) could accommodate the high volumes of safe, long-term storage that will be needed to support hydrogen economies but remain unproven for underground hydrogen storage (UHS). In particular, cushion...
Understanding and simulating mineral reactivity in porous media is challenging due to the complex fabric of natural porous media. Precise spatial characterization via advanced imaging can be used to assess mineral distributions, elemental composition, and mineral accessibility. These factors have been shown to be critical for reactive transport models accurate simulation of the interplay...
Our research team is devoted to developing rock property acquisition techniques for CO2 sequestration projects in shallow aquifers. Target reservoir depth of CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) in aquifers can be shallower than the most of E&P project in terms of economic efficiency. It infers that CCS projects have more chance to deal with unconsolidated rocks. Evaluating unconsolidated rocks is...
Quartz-based minerals in earth’s crust are well-known to contain water-related defects within their volume-constrained lattice, and they are responsible for strength-loss [1-3]. Experimental observations of natural α-quartz indicate that such defects appear as hydroxyl groups attached to Si atoms, called Griggs defect (Si-OH), and molecular water (H2O) located at the interstitial sites....
The transition to a low-carbon economy emphasizes innovations that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while enhancing energy and production efficiency. Among the strategies adopted by oil and gas (O&G) companies is carbonated waterflooding, a method of enhanced oil recovery (EOR-CO2) that involves injecting carbonated water into reservoirs. This technique not only improves oil recovery but also...
Rapid hydrate formation is a long-standing ticklish problem of resource exploitation and industrial application. The mechanism of rapid hydrate formation and its significance remains unrevealed due to the lack of effective research methods. In this work, to reveal comprehensively the rapid hydrate formation behaviors, we conducted in-situ hydrate phase transition experiments from pilot-scale...
Gas displacement in porous media is a vital process with broad industrial and environmental applications. A prominent example is underground hydrogen storage, where understanding the interaction and mixing of hydrogen with cushion gas is essential. This study investigates irregularities in the dispersion behaviour of gas mixtures during opposing flow scenarios, specifically injection and...
Reducing atmospheric carbon is essential in the global strategy to combat climate change. The International Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report emphasizes the critical goal of keeping the rise in global temperatures to under 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels. The report highlights that achieving this temperature goal is unlikely without proper deployment of counteractive...
The computational simulation of petroleum reservoirs is crucial for understanding the dynamics of multiphase flow in geological formations, enabling the development of advanced models and accurate predictions. These simulations rely heavily on parametric constitutive relationships to represent fundamental reservoir engineering properties, such as relative permeability (
Heterogeneity in underground porous formations stems from the changes in petrophysical properties, such as porosity and permeability, and it can significantly affect the flow patterns and transport phenomena. Accordingly, there has been a long-standing interest in modeling and characterizing heat propagation in heterogeneous geothermal reservoirs to formulate feasible and economic development...
This study aims to improve the accuracy and reliability of shale gas production predictions by integrating a Conformer model with 3D reservoir properties, considering well parameters and the geological characteristics surrounding the horizontal wells. A comprehensive analysis of 672 horizontal wells in the Duvernay Formation was conducted to validate the enhanced accuracy and robustness of the...
Understanding how different flow patterns emerge at various macro- and pore scale heterogeneity, pore wettability and surface roughness is remains a long standing scientific challenge. Such understanding allows to predict the amount of trapped fluid left behind, of crucial importance to applications ranging from microfluidics and fuel cells to subsurface storage of carbon and hydrogen. We...
The widespread deployment of wind and solar energy across the United States, along with the increasing use of electrolyzers to convert excess off-peak energy into pure hydrogen from freshwater, offers a promising pathway to reduce the nation’s reliance on carbon-based fossil fuels and facilitate a steady transition to reliable renewable energy sources. Hydrogen is an attractive energy carrier...
We will present our results of an off-lattice Eden model used to simulate the growth of bacterial colonies in the three-dimensional geometry of a Petri dish [1]. In contrast to its two-dimensional counterpart, our model takes a three-dimensional set of possible growth directions and employs additional constraints on growth, which are limited by access to the nutrient layer. We rigorously...
In polymer electrolyte membrane water electrolyzers (PEMWE), the efficiency of electrochemical reactions is critically dependent on the optimal flow of water and oxygen within the porous electrodes. A key challenge is the occurrence of concentration losses, also known as diffusion overpotential or mass transport overpotential (Vdiff), which result from mass transport limitations due to the...
The geological subsurface is expected to play a vital role in securing a sustainable future by playing host to technologies including: geothermal energy, carbon capture and storage and underground hydrogen storage (UHS). In this study, we examine the flow behaviour of hydrogen in different depositional environments for UHS. Geological heterogeneities in the subsurface can affect hydrogen flow...
Use of antibiotic-resistance genes (ARGs) in agriculture is growing as is the recognition of the associated potentially catastrophic threats to human health if such ARGs transfer into pathogenic soil bacteria. Here we summarize previously reported data from our column experiments involving the fate and transport of the ARG nptII in soil from a farm in north-central Oregon, and then detail our...
Abstract:
Fractured-vuggy carbonate rocks are critical for underground water storage and geo-energy reservoirs due to their substantial contributions to fluid reserves and production. The hydromechanical behavior of these rocks is influenced by the presence of multiscale fractures and vugs, which create highly heterogeneous flow pathways. This study investigates the hydro-mechanical...
Early detection and monitoring of induced seismic events resulting from geologic CO2 injection is crucial for ensuring the safety and stability of geologic carbon storage (GCS) operations. At many GCS sites, passive microseismicity detection and analysis is tedious and proper design of autonomous detection systems is labor-intensive. In this study we use multi-head convolutional neural...
We perform a set of high-fidelity simulations of geochemical reactions within three-dimensional discrete fracture networks (DFN) and use various machine learning techniques to determine the primary factors controlling mineral dissolution. The DFN are partially filled with quartz that gradually dissolves until quasi-steady state conditions are reached. At this point, we measure the quartz...
Modeling of surface roughness effect is critical to accurately evaluate pore structures from measurable (such as electrical and electromagnetic) signals. Previous works successfully characterized the 3D pore surface roughness, but only modeled its effect on the surface relaxation of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for individual pores. It becomes unambiguously complicated extending to digital...
Molecular insights into cyclic H2 injection and extraction in shale nanocomposite pore and the role of cushion gas in UHS
Qiujie Chen a, Lei Wang a, , Liang Huang a, , Zhenyao Xu a, Sirun An a, Xinni Feng a, Haiyan Zhu a
a State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation & College of Energy, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu 610059, P.R. China.
* E-mail:...
Hydrogen energy is expected to play a significant role in the energy transition with geological storage poised to be one of the few economic options that will enable a large-scale hydrogen economy. Storage in depleted gas fields is an area of active research given the presence of legacy facilities that could be repurposed coupled with the prior knowledge of the reservoir’s characteristics....
Ultra-low permeability shales provide a promising repository for wastes generated from nuclear energy production. Cooling of high-energy wastes, however, thermolyzes embedded organic matter into fluid phases that may lead to local stress concentration and fracturing. Understanding and controlling the fundamental THMC coupling in these heterogeneous nanoconfined environments is therefore...
Darcy’s law is well-known to be the archetype to model, at the macroscale, creeping, isothermal, steady, Newtonian and incompressible flow taking place at the microscale in rigid and homogeneous porous media subject to no-slip conditions at the solid-fluid interface. This leads to define a permeability tensor, K, that is intrinsic to the porous medium structure and that can be predicted from...
Abstract: The study of CO2 dissolution effects on rock reservoirs during CO2 storage and CO2-enhanced oil and gas recovery is crucial for the effectiveness of underground carbon sequestration projects and for improving oil and gas recovery rates. In this study, the Darcy-Brinkman-Stokes (DBS) model is used to model the reaction-transport at the rock pore scale, based on the theory of...
Plasticity is the study of plastic deformation of materials, which can be quantified using governing and constitutive laws including the conservation of mass, conservation of moment, conservation of energy, and the second law of thermodynamics. A major challenge civil engineers face today is ensuring infrastructure built in coastal environments remains durable, adaptable, and resilient to a...
Understanding porosity in geomaterials is the critical first step to advancing applications like carbon capture and storage, enhanced geothermal systems, and hydrogen storage, where accurate modeling can improve storage efficiency, permeability calculations, and safety. Sandstone, known for its complex and highly porous structure, provides an excellent basis for testing and improving...
The identification of lamination patterns in rock samples is important for understanding petrophysical properties behavior in heterogeneous rocks as laminated structures can influence fluid flow patterns, affecting both routine core analysis (RCAL) and special core analysis (SCAL) measurements [1, 2]. Usually, the identification of these structures rely on subjective human interpretation,...
Biofilm formation in porous media is crucial for understanding microbial processes in subsurface environments, bioremediation, and engineered systems. Previous research has shown that growth may be oxygen-limited under slow flow rates when oxygen is the sole electron acceptor (i.e. under aerobic conditions). Our current research involves growing biofilms in micro-gravity on the International...
Biofilm formation in porous media is crucial for understanding microbial processes in subsurface environments, bioremediation, and engineered systems. Previous research has successfully used microCT imaging to generate 3D images of biofilm architectures grown in porous media using synchrotron radiation (e.g. Ostvar et al. 2018). However, when using the same methodology on a polychromatic x-ray...
The growth and compression of a microalgal particulate cake layer on the filter significantly influence solids separation and water recovery during filtration processes. This study investigates the effects of cake layer compression on the variations in permeate flux through a series of permeation-filtration experiments conducted on sediment cakes composed of microalgal flocs of three different...
The study of fluid-flow and solute transport in natural porous media has applications across diverse geological environments, such as soils for contaminant remediation and rocks for subsurface gas (CO₂ or H₂ storage). Transport processes drive chemical reactions in fluids; however, the inherent disorder of natural porous media introduces heterogeneities in physico-chemical properties across a...
Multiphase flows in the presence of complex solid geometries are omnipresent in porous media processes. Resolving the associated phenomena on a pore level requires the accurate capturing of capillary forces, contact line dynamics and viscous resistance. Frequently, front capturing methods are used to present fluid-fluid interactions, i.e. the Volume of Fluid method (VoF). There, the accuracy...
High-resolution X-ray Computed Tomography (XRCT) is a powerful tool for investigating phase differences in rock samples, such as pores and solids. Despite significant differences in bulk density or porosity between calcite and dolomite, their similar X-ray absorption coefficients lead to comparable gray-scale intensities, making phase differentiation challenging. Overcoming this limitation is...
This research investigates the application of pumice-modified cement systems in improving wellbore integrity for hydrogen storage wells. Laboratory experiments conducted on cement compositions containing 5-25% pumice by weight demonstrated significant improvements in both mechanical properties and gas containment capabilities. The optimal blend (15% pumice) exhibited a 40% reduction in gas...
Rocks, as porous and heterogeneous materials, exhibit fracture behaviors governed by intrinsic properties such as pore structure and connectivity, grain size, mineralogical composition, texture, anisotropy, and pre-existing microcracks. These factors influence the initiation, propagation, and coalescence of cracks, shaping the overall fracturing process. Despite advancements in experimental...
Wellbore cement serves as a critical barrier to prevent the migration of CO2 through the wellbore and to the surface in CO2 geological storage sites. However, the cement may exhibit chemical instability under CO2-rich conditions. This research examines the changes in the pore structure of reaction zones within wellbore cement samples that have been subjected to a CO2-rich solution equilibrated...
Fractured porous media play a critical role in geologic energy storage, influencing the behavior of subsurface systems. However, explicitly modeling thousands of fractures remains computationally challenging due to the need for a detailed representation of fracture networks. Traditional approaches such as finite difference (FD), finite volume (FVM), or finite element methods (FEM) encounter...
The coupled flow, transport, and hydro-chemo-mechanical processes in fractured porous media have great relevance for numerous applications including underground water management, hydrocarbon recovery, CO
Biofilms are living, highly dynamic, microbial communities embedded in a matrix of secreted extracellular polymeric substances (EPS). These complex microbial communities have a significant impact on the petrophysical properties of porous media that they colonise (Jin & Sengupta, 2024). This leads to changes in pore geometry, tortuosity, porosity, wettability, capillary pressure and saturation...
Multi-well placement optimization is a challenging task in the field development process of Geological CO2 Storage and Utilization (GCSU), as the objective function is multi-dimensional, discontinuous, and multi-modal. Despite advancements in gradient-based and gradient-free optimization methods over the past decade, the complexity of geological systems continues to hinder effective well...
Among the reservoir fracture characterization parameters, fracture aperture determines the seepage capacity of dense sandstone reservoirs and is a key parameter in the evaluation of fracture effectiveness, and small changes in aperture often determine whether a fracture serves as a channel or a bottleneck for fluid flow. Taking the dense sandstone of the Ordos Basin as an example, this project...
Global climate change is a pressing issue that has prompted humankind to reduce the overutilization of fossil fuels to fulfill their energy demands. Accordingly, renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and geothermal have gained significant attention in recent years, catering to an ever-increasing proportion of the overall energy supply chain. However, the intermittent nature of these...
Objectives/Scope: In this study, we describe a metagenomic approach which is a Next Generation Sequencing Technique (NGS) for the identification of biosurfactant-producing microbes present in the formation water sample in the oil fields of Upper Assam. In this paper, we describe a method for the isolation and identification of biosurfactant-producing microbial strains present in the...
Mineral precipitation and deposition during reactive flows through porous media are common phenomena in various natural and industrial processes, including biomineralization, marine sedimentation, water treatment, groundwater remediation, concrete carbonation, geothermal energy production, and geologic carbon sequestration. This process typically begins when fluids with different compositions...
Subsurface applications frequently involve the injection of fluids into the subsurface, which can result in mixing-induced mineral precipitation due to distinct geochemical properties of the injection fluid and ambient groundwater. In particular, during in situ carbon mineralization, the mixing of CO2-saturated solution with ambient groundwater can trigger the mineralization. This study...
In underground hydrogen storage, mixing between Hydrogen and cushion gas could present a problem to the recoverability of working gas and may be a controlling factor in subsurface reactions. The conventional modelling approach focuses mainly on diffusion as the primary mixing process, while little attention is paid to dispersive mixing. Using the finite element simulator COMSOL this work...
Digital rock physics provides a powerful framework for characterizing the physical properties of rock samples using computational methods. In this work, we present a set of numerically efficient solvers developed for stationary diffusion problems, enabling the computation of thermal conductivity, electrical conductivity, and permittivity from micro-CT images of rock samples.
The solvers are...
X-ray microtomography has been established as a fundamental technique for studying porous media across scales ranging from nanometers to centimeters. It is widely used in the routine characterization of materials, particularly rocks, and dynamic processes. However, the complexity of X-ray beam interactions with imaged materials, especially when using polychromatic beams in laboratory...
Aquatic sponge tissue is the quintessential living, porous, viscoelastic solid. These animals grow in a myriad of forms, intuitively to maximize flow through their unidirectional water and particulate transport system, or aquiferous system, however the data remain equivocal. Several studies have quantified the dissipative loss from hydraulic transport while ignoring friction from...
To reduce carbon emissions, transitioning the energy system from traditional fossil fuels to clean energy sources is crucial. Hydrogen energy has emerged as a highly promising clean energy option, attracting increasing attention. However, one of the primary challenges hindering the development of hydrogen energy is its storage. Underground hydrogen storage (UHS) has become a vital technology...
Acid stimulation is a widely employed technique in the oil and gas industry to enhance the permeability of carbonate reservoirs by creating preferential flow channels, known as wormholes. These highly efficient flow pathways are crucial for improving fluid transport in porous media, enabling the bypass of damaged zones near the wellbore. Understanding wormhole formation, structure, and...
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) are an integral part of the expanding renewable energy portfolio and hold the promise of deploying geothermal energy sources beyond traditional areas. Optimizing injection strategies and the placement of new wells in existing and prospective hydrothermal fields requires a thorough understanding of fluid and temperature distribution in fractured subsurface...
Density-driven segregations in rotating drums, well-studied under dry conditions, reveal diverse symmetrical patterns due to variations in heavy and light grain densities (ρh, ρl,) and rotating speeds (<span>ω</span>). Experimentally, we observe a complete segregation state in submerged systems, absent under dry conditions for the same ρh,...
Understanding the occurrence and flow mechanisms of shale oil in nanopores is critical for advancing knowledge of fluid behavior in porous media. Previous studies have often overlooked key factors such as the multi-component nature of shale oil, the realistic properties of nanopore walls, and nanopore flexibility, resulting in limited understanding of shale oil's behavior in nanoconfined...
Soil-Aquifer Treatment (SAT) is a well-established water storage and tertiary wastewater treatment strategy with low energy requirements. For example, effluent from the Shafdan Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) in Israel is processed through SAT systems to improve water quality before its reuse for crop irrigation. SAT systems operate by allowing water to infiltrate the subsurface, where...
Groundwater, while abundant, remains highly susceptible to contamination from industrial effluents, improper waste disposal, and excessive agricultural fertilizer use. In recent years, the improper application of nitrogen-based fertilizers has significantly contributed to nitrate contamination in the groundwater systems of eastern coastal India. This study focuses on two vulnerable regions in...
When exposed to high temperatures, carbon/phenolic ablators undergo pyrolysis. In this process, the phenolic component of the ablator gets decomposed into a series of gaseous products. These products percolate through the hot fibrous charred material towards the surface, providing a blockage effect from the harsh external environment. While
the pyrolysis products percolate through the hot...
In fluid-solid interaction systems, reactions at the interface can significantly influence the diffusion process, leading to complex mass transfer dynamics. This study presents a mathematical model to investigate the coupled behavior of an acid solution interacting with a reactive solid boundary. By formulating a one-dimensional diffusion equation with various types of reactions at the...
Coal combustion ash (CCA), specifically fly ash, is a supplementary cementitious material (SCM) used in the construction industry to lower the carbon footprint and the cost-efficiency of concrete production. However, the inclusion of CCA introduces challenges to achieving adequate air void (i.e., large pore) structure because of the adsorption of the air entraining admixtures (AEAs) by the...
Geologic gas storage opens exciting horizons for at-scale decarbonization (e.g., CO2 storage, seasonal H2 storage, etc.), but is encumbered by potential for leakage due to fluid-solid reactions (e.g., embrittlement, permeability heterogeneity). The distribution and control of naturally-occurring bacteria that enable mineralization in these formations, a process known as microbially-induced...
Scaling heterogeneous aperture distributions into equivalent permeability tensors allows for using coarser grids to simulate flow in fractured porous media, significantly reducing computational costs while maintaining accuracy. This work introduces a framework that leverages Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGANs) to upscale the permeability of single fractures efficiently. The...
The fourth-generation synchrotron facility provides X-rays from low to high energy with a high flux of photons that, coupled with advanced detector technology, allow routine acquisition of high-resolution tomograms in a few seconds. In addition to high-throughput experiments, in this case, computed tomography can also be resolved in time, which is the 4D CT scan. Among the wide range of...
Geological carbon storage is an essential part of climate change mitigation. The Illinois Basin has become an early focal point of geological carbon storage (GCS) research and its implementation in the United States. The principal storage target in the basin is the Mount Simon Sandstone. Known for its exceptional thickness, depth, porosity, and sealing properties of overlying formations, this...
Multi-phase fluid transport in the subsurface natural porous sandstone governs numerous energetic, industrial, and environment activities. A new approach for nanometer-millimeter pore connectivity quantification is compiled by integration of multiple scale pore structure characterization techniques involving casting thin section (CTS), scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray tomography...
As the global demand to limit the heating of the planet to 1.5 to 2.0 °C by 2050 becomes increasingly urgent, the CO
During in situ carbon mineralization, the mixing of injected carbonated water with ambient groundwater can trigger rapid mineral formation. Notably, pH strongly influences carbonate speciation, which is pivotal in driving carbon mineralization. Previous studies have shown that when two fluids mix and create a supersaturated environment with respect to certain minerals, precipitates form at the...
Radial flow of shear-thinning fluids in rock fractures is ubiquitous in subsurface engineering practices, including drilling, hydraulic fracturing and rock grouting. It is hence of practical significance to investigate the flow dynamics of shear-thinning fluids in radial injection scenario. Here, by conducting a series of visualization experiments of xanthan gum solutions displacing silicone...
In-situ mineralization provides a promising pathway for permanent carbon storage, but achieving efficient subsurface mineralization requires sufficient permeability in the host rock formation, a significant challenge for scaling up these processes. This work investigates the effects of fracture characteristics (i.e., surface roughness and fracture aperture) on CO2 mineralization reaction by...
We present screening-type models for quantifying the fate and transport of perfluoroalkyl acids and their precursors (PFAS) in a heterogeneous vadose zone. The models represent the heterogeneous vadose zone by one-dimensional dual-porosity, dual-permeability, or tripe-porosity domains. They account for transport mechanisms specific to PFAS and their precursors---including multi-site...
Water reclamation and reuse has become a popular practice in arid to semi-arid regions, especially in the western United States. Conventional wastewater treatment methods often fall short of completely removing viruses, causing the introduction of myriad of viruses in the water environment with potential for hazardous impact on human health. Current fecal contamination indicators including...
Pore-scale simulations are computationally expensive and the presence of non-unique solutions can require multiple simulations within a single geometry. To overcome the computational cost hurdle, we propose a method that couples generative diffusion models and physics-based simulations. While training the data-driven model, we simultaneously generate initial conditions and perform...
Swimming bacteria can adapt their swimming in the face of environmental cues and stresses. In response to nutrient gradients, bacteria lower their tumbling frequency when going up the gradients, leading to a net drift toward the nutrient source. In the presence of flows and in crowded environments, however, bacterial swimming patterns change. They get trapped near surfaces due to flow shear,...
During drilling, the instability of the wellbore is always a severe problem, which might lead to borehole failure in shale formation. But this kind of borehole failure could be eased using the optimum mud weight and the better well trajectory. Many drilling problems include the kick or blowout, wellbore collapse, or lost circulation. This study applied a geo-mechanical model and rock failure...
Shale gas is predominantly stored within the micro- and nano-scale porous matrix of shale formations, existing primarily in adsorbed and free states. In contrast to conventional hydrocarbon reservoirs, shale reservoirs exhibit unique characteristics in their pore and fracture systems. The primary reservoir space resides at the nano-scale, with significantly lower development of natural...
Thermal excitation of coal seams by high-temperature steam is a highly promising technology to increase gas production. Among them, steam permeability is a key parameter characterizing the injection capability of thermal fluids. However, the seepage law of steam in coal and its evolution mechanism are still unknown. In order to solve the above problems, experiments were carried out to...
Fractures are voids in rock, defined by rough surfaces in partial contact, that often create complex flow and transport networks. Flow and transport in fractured systems is complicated by coupled processes such as colloid transport, water-rock interactions, and geomechanics. Understanding these coupled processes is essential for permeability and injectivity management in oil and gas...
Fungi play a critical role in various environmental processes, such as consuming rocks and contaminants to create nutrients, regulating carbon cycles through decomposition and sequestration, contributing to soil formation, and supporting plant growth. These processes often involve complex interactions between multiple fluid and mineral phases in porous media. However, the mechanisms by which...
Successful CO2 sequestration in a saline reservoir requires characterizing the geological storage site to develop an understanding of fluid transport behavior for long-term modeling and risk assessment. The Department of Energy is supporting numerous carbon storage field projects across the United States to advance this technology, and the CarbonSAFE San Juan Basin (SJB) project is one of...
Discrete fracture networks (DFNs) offer high-fidelity simulations of flow and transport in fractured media, but the complex networks they represent are often computationally prohibitive at field scales. Identification of network backbones, relatively small subgraphs that capture major network processes, can significantly reduce computations and expose important topological structures. We...
SCAL (Special Core Analysis) tests are essential for determining the prop-
erties of heterogeneous porous media under multiphase internal flow, including
capillary pressure, relative permeability, and wettability. These tests are pivotal
for predicting reservoir performance. Among them, the USS (Unsteady-State)
core flooding test is particularly noteworthy. In this test, an oil-saturated...
As global warming intensifies, CO₂ sequestration has been recognized as one of the most feasible strategies for reducing CO₂ emissions. Within CO₂ sequestration approaches, the CO₂ mineralization process, a promising CO₂ sequestration method, consists of four main steps: (1) injection of CO₂-saturated water into basalt formations, (2) dissolution of mafic minerals within the porous media, (3)...
The increasing global demand for safe drinking water emphasizes the importance of energy-efficient and sustainable treatment technologies such as slow sand filtration (SSF). Central to SSF's efficacy is the bioactive layer, or Schmutzdecke (SD), which facilitates particle removal through biological and physical processes. This study bridges microscale insights into biofilm dynamics with...
Mineral armoring, the formation of tight coatings on primary minerals, occurs in various subsurface systems, such as mineral weathering, CO2 sequestration through serpentine carbonation, and anoxic steel corrosion in nuclear waste disposal facilities. This process involves coupled dissolution-precipitation reactions, where a primary mineral dissolves, and a secondary mineral precipitates on...
Understanding CO₂ mineralization at the pore scale is essential for advancing carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies and addressing global climate change. Evaporite layers, predominantly composed of minerals like gypsum and sodium chloride, are often associated with key CO₂ reservoirs, such as mafic and ultramafic rocks. Understanding how pore structures evolve during carbon...
Perfluoroalkyl and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), as constituents of many industrial products, pose significant risks to groundwater quality and ecosystem health due to their persistence in the environment and their association with various health issues. Permeable reactive barriers (PRBs) can offer a cost-effective and energy-efficient in situ solution for PFAS groundwater plume...
Understanding fluid dynamics within natural rock formations is crucial for optimising porous fluid flow with direct applications for CO₂ mineral trapping and hydrogen production. At the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), technological advancements have significantly enhanced our ability to observe these phenomena in real time and under in situ conditions.
ESRF's beamline ID19 has...
Geothermal energy plays an important role in the transition towards renewable and carbon-neutral energy resources. For some geothermal fields enhancing water-rock heat exchange is required by either fracking or by blocking large conduits. Here we test a novel approach for blocking large fractures using heat sensitive epoxy resin foam droplets that can be advected to target regions of the...
Nanofluid enhanced imbibition is a frontier technology to improve the recovery of low permeability，and also has a great application prospect for the development of pressure infiltration in ultra-low permeability fractured reservoirs.
A series of in-situ imbibition experiments of self-made Nanofluid SNFSL combined with the NMR technology were conducted for ultra-low permeability fracture...
Equilibrium and kinetic behavior of adsorption-induced deformation attracted much attention in the last decades [1,2]. This phenomenon is ubiquitous but challenging to predict quantitatively due to numerous factors (pore size and geometry, adsorbent/adsorbate combination, temperature, etc.) affecting its manifestation. Time may be considered as one of these factors as many industrial and...
Reactive flow interactions in porous media are of great relevance in carbonate acidizing operations and in the geological storage of CO2 and hydrogen. The literature presents advances in understanding certain parameters on the core scale; however, there are still new challenges on the pore scale that can aid in comprehending the phenomenon of acidification. In addition, new discoveries...
The fundamental importance of CO2 trapping mechanisms during geological storage in deep saline aquifers (DSA) remains indisputable and requires adequate means for adequate description and successful application. During last decades tremendous efforts have been made in many research areas to provide experimental, theoretical, simulation and pilot tests data at diverse conditions and multiple...
We present a steady Stokes–Cahn–Hilliard–Oono–Puri system in a porous medium filled with two immiscible and incompressible fluids partially mixed within a diffused interface. The model is derived using the Rayleighian approach, incorporating the Ohta–Kawasaki free energy, surface free energy, and a nonhomogeneous Neumann boundary condition for the order parameter, which introduces complexities...
Water damage to gas permeability significantly impacts hydrocarbon recovery in gas reservoirs by altering the flow dynamics of gas and water phases within porous media. Addressing this challenge requires a deep understanding of fluid flow and distribution in porous structures to optimize hydrocarbon recovery strategies. Traditional bundle-of-tubes models often assume simplified circular pore...
In situ chemical oxidation (ISCO) has become a widely used remediation technique for contaminated areas due to its proven effectiveness. The use of potassium permanganate (KMnO4) to degrade trichloroethylene (TCE, C4HCl3) has demonstrated favorable results in both pilot- and field-scale studies. However, a key challenge in optimizing the process lies in the limited understanding of reactions...
The Gas Diffusion Layer (GDL) is a porous part of the fuel cell and electrolysers that influences the mass transfer in the devices, which has led to a number of studies on its flow properties, including permeability, by different authors. This study conducted single-phase and two-phase flow simulations for four commercially available GDLs utilizing the OpenFOAM computational framework, which...
Poroviscoelastic equations coupled with the hybrid mixture theory (HMT) based fluid transport equations were studied for conventional and microwave frying of foods. In poroviscoelastic foods, the porous structure, fluid flow paths, and mechanical behavior continuously change during frying. As frying progresses, smaller pores merge to form larger pores, cell wall thickness changes, pore sizes...
We study a quasi-2D oil-in-water emulsion flowing through a microfluidic porous material, stabilized into droplets by a weak surfactant. The porous material creates droplet breakup against static obstacles, and the weak surfactant does not completely inhibit coalescence. Therefore, the droplets arrive at a steady-state size distribution, which is a function of the system geometry, flow speeds,...
Flow and transport in fractured media are governed by complex interactions between geological heterogeneity and fluid properties. In subsurface systems, fluids with different densities often coexist, leading to density-driven flow that can impact flow and transport. Additionally, in fractured systems where high flow velocities are common, fluid inertia can further influence transport dynamics...
Over the past 250 years, atmospheric CO₂ levels have increased markedly, rising from 270 to 370 parts per million (ppm), with half of this growth occurring within the last five decades. This trend is predominantly attributed to the intensified use of fossil fuels for energy production [1, 2]. Projections by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggest that, without...
Reservoir changes in bulk porosity and permeability induced by mineral precipitation can reduce the efficiency of energy production and CO2 storage operations. The efficiency of these operations will be greatly improved if precipitation-induced changes to the bulk reservoir porosity and permeability can be accurately predicted via models that factor the influence of measurable variables like...
The Gulong shale oil resources in the Songliao Basin are abundant, predominantly concentrated in the Qingshankou and Nenjiang Formations. Immature to low-maturity shale is widely distributed, particularly in the first and second members, with a maturity level (Ro) generally below 0.75%. In-situ transformation methods can convert the organic matter within immature and low-maturity shale into...
Shale rocks have proven to be a challenge for their characterization. Even more so when trying to resolve porosity in the nanoscale (1 y 2). The extremely small size of the porosity, the role of the complicated composition, the lability of certain compounds and the fluids present in the pores are a few of the characteristics that make a very complex system to study. In terms of composition,...
Latex inks are one of the most prevalent types of inks within the inkjet printing market. These inks are water-based, but commonly contain cosolvents to tune their liquid properties. After the printing process these cosolvents are in part (<5 wt% cosolvents in paper) left in the paper, where over a period of days to months (long-term) they will redistribute to form a uniform concentration...
Miscible multiphase flow in porous media involves displacing a resident fluid by another fluid of different viscosity and density. This process arises in various applications, such as groundwater remediation, hydrogen storage, moisture and solute transport, and geological carbon sequestration, where mixing leads to an intermediate fluid phase distinct from the original phases, thus changing...
Contamination of soils and aquifers by light non-aqueous phase liquids (LNAPLs) poses significant risks to environmental sustainability and public health. Conventional in-situ LNAPL remediation techniques often encounter high costs and limited efficiency challenges, leaving residual hydrocarbons trapped within soil pores. As an alternative, unconventional in-situ flushing using complex...
The latter developments in printing industry showed that the inkjet technology delivers good print quality using the flexibility of digital printing at a breakthrough cost price. At Canon Production Printing company, we consider the inkjet technology as the flagship of our successful R&D printer design and production.
The study of ink penetration in thin porous media (paper) is a...
pH-induced reactive transport among miscible phases in porous environments is pivotal in carbon capture and storage (CCS) applications, especially in the carbon sequestration process, where the mixing process among the miscible phases affects the pH transport. However, separating the pH migration from the mixing is challenging due to the pore-scale heterogeneities and limited understanding of...
Immiscible multi-phase flow within porous structures plays a crucial role in a variety of natural and industrial processes and is governed by several forces such as viscous, capillary, and buoyancy forces and pore geometry. Understanding the interplay of these factors is critical in controlling the behaviour of fluid-fluid interfaces in multi-phase flow in porous media. This interplay...
Freeze-thaw cycles are ubiquitous in cold climates and can affect groundwater recharge and solute transport through the porous subsurface. These cycles create freezing and melting fronts that propagate centimeters to meters into the vadose zone. Within the vadose zone, these fronts cause spatial and temporal variations in pressure and temperature that impact flow and transport. These coupled...
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...
Conducting coreflooding experiments with high-resolution imaging has become a key approach for understanding the physical phenomena governing CO2 storage in underground porous geological formations. These experiments focus on displacement and trapping mechanisms of immiscible phases, which are predominantly capillary-dominated. A significant advantage of pore-scale imaging lies in its ability...
The interaction of acidic fluids with carbonate rock formations is a key factor during reactive flow in carbonate acidizing operations. Although several studies have evaluated the reactivity of carbonate rocks, a critical gap remains concerning the influence of pre-experimental cleaning processes. Most studies involving outcrop rocks tend to overlook this aspect, yet the cleaning process can...
Mineral dissolution is a key process of subsurface systems and engineering applications, such as karst formation and engineered carbon mineralization. Fluid flows have been shown to significantly affect mineral dissolution rates by controlling concentration fields [1-2], highlighting the importance of understanding flow-dissolution dynamics. In subsurface porous and fractured media, inertial...
In a 2014 report, the DOE recognized the paper industry as the third largest consumer of energy in the United States, accounting for 13% of the manufacturing energy consumption used nationally. Because water is predominantly the carrier fluid during paper manufacture, evaporative drying at the end of the manufacturing process can account for 2/3 of paper making energy consumption. Accordingly,...
Salt Crystallization in Porous Media is a critical phenomenon found in various natural processes and applications, such as the degradation of built structures, gas recovery and storage, and underground CO₂ storage. This phenomenon impacts the petrophysical properties of rocks, particularly porosity and permeability, fundamental parameters in the description of fluid flow in porous media. The...
Approximately 13% of the Earth's land surface is devoted to agricultural cropland where the process of bare-soil evaporation is a significant, nonviable loss of soil water. In arid or semiarid settings, this process can account for more than half of the total evapotranspirative losses. Bare-soil evaporation is driven by several different variables such as radiation, temperature, and air flow....
Many subsurface and industrial porous media such as soils, carbonate rocks, filters, and catalysts possess multiscale pore structures that play an important role in regulating fluid flow and transport processes. A pore-network-continuum hybrid flow model is promising for numerical studies of a multiscale digital rock [1-3]. It is, however, still prohibitive to the REV-size modeling because...
In the context of carbon sequestration in saline aquifers, evaluating storage security and capacity requires a thorough understanding of the interactions between CO₂ and reservoir fluids. While significant research has focused on the solubility of individual gases in brine and water, limited studies have explored the solubility of CO₂–N₂ mixtures, such as those in power plant flue gases, in...
Accurate simulation of interfacial mass transfer during CO₂ displacement represents a fundamental challenge in modeling enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and carbon sequestration processes. This research presents an improved single-field numerical framework that integrates volume-of-fluid (VOF) methodology with Continuum Species Transfer (CST) method to capture complex pore scale interfacial...
This study deals with the influence of a convergent flow on the solutes transport, subjected to rate-limited sorption in the fluid saturated porous medium of a finite cylindric shape. A simulation of this transport was conducted using the two-dimensional advection-dispersion model, in cylindrical coordinates system. Across the entire inlet surface of the column, the injection of solutes was of...
Sub-microgels, crosslinked polymer particles, have attracted increasing interest in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS), carbon storage, and groundwater management field. However, it is still unclear how to properly utilize these elastic particles underground because the transport and retention are not well studied so far, especially in oil fields. This study...
The injection of CO2 into saline water-bearing formations for long-term carbon capture and underground storage (CCS) alters the subsurface mineral stability and can lead to the alteration of reactive minerals prior to long-term mineralization. We simulate how the alteration of reactive cements in Morrow B and Entrada sandstone changes different facies’ absolute permeability by combining X-ray...
The shale reservoir is characterized by complex pore structures spanning nano- to micron-scale, with fluid flow behavior varying significantly across these scales. To address the challenges of simulating multi-scale flow in digital cores, this study develops a novel micro-flow simulation method based on automatic microstructure classification using the K-means clustering algorithm. By...
We study the hygromechanical behavior of composite consisting of amorphous cellulose, xylan, lignins reinforced or not with crystalline cellulose and treat the composites with polyethylene glycol as consolidant. We simulate water adsorption and desorption in amorphous polymers, allow observations on mechanical behavior like swelling and shrinking, mechanical softening in compression and shear,...
Geological carbon sequestration, the capture and underground storage of CO2, is widely considered the primary approach to offset CO2 emissions from large-scale fossil fuel consumption. A key requirement for any potential storage site is the presence of an effective caprock. The caprock's sealing capacity, or its ability to prevent CO2 escape, is critical in any proposed storage project [1]....
In the scope of nuclear waste disposal facilities active clays are beneficial in comparison to other materials due to their higher swelling and sealing abilities. A unique correlation has previously been established between the final swelling pressure and the dry density of MX-80 bentonite. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that the final swelling pressure is independent of the material's...
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are consistently detected in wastewater treatment plant effluent and urban stormwater runoff at concentrations that exceed federal health advisory levels. Soils and sediments in adjacent wetlands and floodplains may accumulate PFAS due to periodic ponding events. However, our understanding of PFAS transport and partitioning mechanisms in these areas...
Discriminating nuclear weapons testing programs from civilian sources is difficult due to highly variable atmospheric radioxenon backgrounds. We aim to study the transport of byproduct gases produced by subsurface explosions, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen (H2), as novel signatures for proliferation monitoring. To demonstrate how ratios of gases produced by explosions can change...
Complex interactions between geological heterogeneity and fluid properties govern flow and transport in fractured media. These dynamics are critical for applications such as contaminant remediation, enhanced geothermal systems, and geologic carbon sequestration, where density-driven flow can impact transport. Under these conditions, fracture network characteristics significantly control flow...
Sand and dust storms (SDS) and emissions are extreme weather events that can silently cross borders and impact millions globally. The SDS can pose threats to environmental and human health across all continents. These storms arise from complex interactions between atmospheric and land factors, with soil properties playing a pivotal role in their formation, intensity and consequence impacts....
We have developed a comprehensive numerical model for the transport and drying of solutions in thin porous media that consist of permeable fibers such as paper. We explicitly account for the gas-phase transport dynamics. Moreover, we introduce an empirical relation for the concentration- and molecular-weight dependence of the pore-fiber transport rate of the solutes. These two key elements...
Subsurface applications like geologic carbon storage and geothermal energy recovery require near-real-time, accurate forecasting for safe and optimized operations. In this presentation, we develop and test an improved data assimilation framework that combines deep generative models as priors in the latent space for parameterization with deep learning-based reduced-order models for rapid...
This study focuses on the prediction of incremental oil recovery under polymer-based chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) schemes using a novel time-series-based modeling workflow, thus eliminating the need for extensive reservoir characterization and complex simulations. The core objective is to improve the forecast accuracy and optimize the implementation of polymer flooding techniques for...
Coupled mineral dissolution and precipitation processes with gas production are critical processes in energy subsurface systems, e.g., generating hydrogen gas during the anoxic corrosion of metallic nuclear waste canisters, during natural hydrogen degassing from serpentinized mafic rocks, and CO
Diffusive transport is ubiquitous in geosystems, but diffusion in heterogeneous and fractured systems can be complex. For a nuclear waste disposal repository within a salt geological formation, diffusive transport is anticipated to be a primary mechanism for subsurface transport of radionuclides into the geosphere. A recent DECOVALEX-2023 model and code comparison study (LaForce et al., 2024)...
Abstract
Soil pollution by petroleum hydrocarbons a global environmental problem with harmful effects on ecosystems and human health. Remediation is an essential for restoring soil quality and preventing further environmental degradation.
Petroleum hydrocarbons, including crude oil and its derivatives are composed of petroleum hydrocarbons that can remain in the soil for an extended...
Accurate simulation of two-phase flow in porous media is crucial for understanding fluid dynamics in reservoir engineering, particularly in SCAL experiments such as counter-current spontaneous imbibition (COUCSI). However, traditional numerical methods are computationally expensive and often struggle to efficiently handle flow uncertainties.
In this work, we explore the application of machine...
We analyze the progression of gravity currents in heterogeneous media under different kinds of heterogeneity, more precisely, multiGaussian realizations, non-Gaussian realizations and sedimentary-like realizations. The analysis focuses on the time evolution of the free surface as a dense liquid enters a reservoir filled with a much lighert liquid. Probability maps of this surface are built,...
(1) Purpose and scope of the study;
With the development of artificial intelligence technologies, AI-based oil and gas productivity prediction has become a hotspot. However, traditional Estimated Ultimate Recovery (EUR) intelligent prediction is mostly data-driven without physical constraints, leading to limited model generalization ability and large discrepancies between predicted EUR and...
Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS) have been gaining interest in recent years as structured porous medium in numerous engineering applications [1], including compact heat exchangers [2], [3], [4], heat sinks [5] and phase change materials [6]. TPMS are periodic lattices generated by the combination of sine and cosine functions in 3D, the manufacturing of which has been enabled by the...
RepoTREND (Fig. 1) is a novel simulation tool designed for modeling processes in geological repositories for radioactive waste. It enables the analysis of contaminant release, migration through geological barriers, and radiological impacts on the biosphere. The modular structure of RepoTREND allows for flexible and adaptive modeling of different repository subsystems.
The simulation domain...
