Pore‐Scale Modeling of Reactive Transport with Coupled Mineral Dissolution and Precipitation

Abstract

AbstractWe present a new pore‐scale model for multicomponent advective‐diffusive transport with coupled mineral dissolution and precipitation. Both dissolution and precipitation are captured simultaneously by introducing a phase transformation vector field representing the direction and magnitude of the overall phase change. An effective viscosity model is adopted in simulating fluid flow during mineral dissolution‐precipitation that can accurately capture the velocity field without introducing any empirical parameters. The proposed approach is validated against analytical solutions and interface tracking simulations in simplified structures. After validation, the proposed approach is employed in modeling realistic rocks where mineral dissolution and precipitation are dominant at different locations. We have identified three regimes for mineral dissolution‐precipitation coupling: (a) compact dissolution‐precipitation where dissolution is dominant near the inlet and precipitation is dominant near the outlet, (b) wormhole dissolution with clustered precipitation where dissolution generates wormholes in the main flow paths and precipitation clogs the secondary flow paths, and (c) dissolution dominant where all solid grains are gradually dissolved. In the three regimes, the proposed approach provides reliable porosity‐permeability relationships that cannot be described well by traditional macroscale models. We find that the permeability can increase while the overall porosity decreases when the main flow paths are expanded by dissolution and adjacent pore spaces are clogged by precipitation.