Porous Media
High-fidelity simulations of groundwater flow provide valuable insights into many
geologic phenomena important to the US Department of Energy,
such as
- determining the storage security of carbon sequestration,
- monitoring contaminant behavior,
- enhanced oil recovery.
Realizing this potential is challenging because simulations must
- encapsulate a broad range of scales,
- provide accurate treatments of multiphase, multicomponent flow in porous media,
- involve a large number of reactive species to accurately represent real geochemical system.
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| AMR Framework for Multicomponent Multiphase Reactive Flow
Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) methods address the challenges outlined above:
- Multiscale: resolves difference in length scales between flow regimes and time scales between flow and reaction.
- Proven framework: reuse of core CCSE technologies reduces development efforts.
- Parallelized codes: good behavior up to several thousands CPUs.
- Improved resolution: significant gain compared to existing codes.
We use the total velocity splitting formulation and the discretization
procedure reflects the mathematical properties of the governing
equations.
Details can be found in Pau et al. (2009).
[pdf]
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Carbon Dioxide Sequestration
In one scenario for carbon sequestration, CO2 is injected as a liquid phase into a saline aquifer.
The liquid CO2 is lighter than the brine and floats on top of it in the aquifer.
However, as the brine is enriched by diffusive mixing with CO2, it becomes denser than
the fluid in the aquifer, inducing a buoyancy driven flow in the aquifer.
To better understand and
characterize this process, we perform high resolution simulations that
examine the transport mechanisms and provide accurate quantifications
of integral measures such as onset time of convection and the long term
stabilized mass flux. |
| Reactive Flow
Accurate
modeling of reacting flow has many important ramifications in
geologically important problems such as carbon sequestration and
environmental remediation. We have developed a second-order accurate
adaptive scheme for the accurate simulation of reactive flow.
Geochemical systems are treated using the chemistry module of
TOUGHREACT.
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For more
information, please contact George
Pau.
Relevant Publications
G. S. H.
Pau, J. B. Bell, K. Pruess, A. S. Almgren, M. J. Lijewski,
K. Zhang, "High resolution simulation and characterization of
density-driven flow in CO2 storage in saline aquifers'',
Advances in Water Resources
, 33(4):443-455, 2010. [pdf]
G. S. H. Pau, J. B. Bell, K. Pruess, A. S. Almgren, M. J. Lijewski, K. Zhang,
"Numerical studies of density-driven flow in CO2 storage in saline aquifers'',
Proceedings of TOUGH Symposium, September 14-16 2009, Berkeley, California, USA.
[pdf]
G. S. H. Pau, A. S. Almgren, J. B. Bell, M. J. Lijewski,
E. Sonnenthal, N. Spycher, T. Xu, G. Zhang,
"A Parallel Second-Order Adaptive Mesh Algorithm for Reactive Flow in Geochemical Systems",
Proceedings of TOUGH Symposium, September 14-16 2009, Berkeley, California, USA.
[pdf]
G. S. H. Pau, A. S. Almgren, J. B. Bell, and M. J. Lijewski,
"A Parallel Second-Order Adaptive Mesh Algorithm for Incompressible Flow in Porous Media",
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 2009. LBNL Report LBNL-176E.
[pdf]
D.E.A. van Odyck, J.B. Bell, F. Monmont, N. Nikiforakis,
"The mathematical
structure of multiphase thermal models of flow in porous media",
to appear in Proc. Royal Soc. A.
[pdf]
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