HOMOGENIZATION OF COMPLEX FLOWS IN POROUS MEDIA AND APPLICATIONS

Harsha Hutridurga Ramaiah · 2013

Our work is a contribution to the understanding of transport of solutes in a porous medium. It has applications in groundwater contaminant transport, CO2 sequestration, underground storage of nuclear waste, oil reservoir simulations. We derive expressions for the effective Taylor dispersion taking into account convection, diffusion, heterogeneous geometry of the porous medium and reaction phenomena. Microscopic phenomena at the pore scale are upscaled to obtain effective behaviour at the observation scale. Method of two-scale convergence with drift from the theory of homogenization is employed as an upscaling technique. In the first part of our work, we consider reactions of mass exchange type, adsorption/desorption, at the fluid-solid interface of the porous medium. Starting with coupled convection-diffusion equations for bulk and surface concentrations of a single solute, coupled via adsorption isotherms, at a microscopic scale we derive effective equations at the macroscopic scale. We consider the microscopic system with highly oscillating coefficients in a strong convection regime i.e., large Peclet regime. The presence of strong convection in the microscopic model leads to the induction of a large drift in the concentration profiles. Both linear and nonlinear adsorption isotherms are considered and the results are compared. In the second part of our work we generalize our results on single component flow to multicomponent flow in a linear setting. In the latter case, the effective parameters are obtained using Factorization principle and two-scale convergence with drift. The behaviour of effective parameters with respect to Peclet number and Damkohler number are numerically studied. Freefem++ is used to perform numerical tests in two dimensions.

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