porousMedia4Foam: Multi-scale open-source platform for hydro-geochemical
simulations with OpenFOAM
Abstract
porousMedia4Foam is a package for solving flow and transport in
porous media using OpenFOAM - a popular open-source numerical toolbox.
We introduce and highlight the features of a new generation open-source
hydro-geochemical module implemented within porousMedia4Foam. It
opens up a new dimension to investigate hydro-geochemical processes
occurring at multiple scales i.e. at the pore-scale,
reservoir-scale and at the hybrid-scale relying on the concepts of
micro-continuum. The package is designed such that only the chemistry
part of the solver is handled by an external package, the geochemical
package, which is coupled to the flow and transport solver of OpenFOAM.
The evolution of the porous media and fluid properties, such as
porosity, permeability, reactive surface area, or diffusivity of
chemical species, are handled by various models that we implemented in
the package. For the present work, PHREEQC was chosen as the geochemical
solver. We conducted benchmarks across different scales to validate the
accuracy of our simulator. We further looked at the evolution of mineral
dissolution/ precipitation in a hybrid system comprising of a fracture
and reactive porous medium.