Random-walk Modeling of Reactive Transport in Porous Media With a
Reduced-order Chemical Basis of Conservative Components
Abstract
In this work we employ a reduced-order basis of conservative chemical
components to model reactive transport using a Lagrangian (particle
tracking) method. While this practice is well-understood in the Eulerian
(grid-based) context, its adaptation to a Lagrangian context requires a
novel reformulation of particle transport properties. Because the number
of conservative-species particles need not change during simulation,
spatial resolution stays constant in time, and there is no increase in
computational expense due to increasing numbers of product particles.
Additionally, this treatment simplifies the interaction between
equilibrium and kinetic reactions and allows the use of
species-dependent transport operators at the same time. We apply this
method to model a suite of simple test problems that include equilibrium
and kinetic reactions, and results exhibit excellent match with
base-case Eulerian results. Finally, we apply the new method to model a
2D problem concerning the mobilisation of cadmium by a CO$_2$ leak,
showing the potential applicability of the proposed methodology.