Ureolytically driven calcite precipitation is a promising approach for inducing subsurface mineral precipitation, but engineered application requires the ability to control and predict precipitate distribution. To study the coupling between reactant transport and precipitate distribution, columns with defined zones of immobilized urease were used to examine the distribution of calcium carbonate precipitation along the flow path, at two different initial flow rates. As expected, with slower flow precipitate was concentrated toward the upstream end of the enzyme zone and with higher flow the solid was more uniformly distributed over the enzyme zone. Under constant hydraulic head conditions the flow rate decreased as precipitates decreased porosity and permeability. The hydrolysis/precipitation zone was expected to become compressed in the upstream direction. However, apparent reductions in the urea hydrolysis rate and changes in the distribution of enzyme activity, possibly due to CaCO3 precipitate hindering urea transport to the enzyme, or enzyme mobilization, mitigated reaction zone compression. Co-injected strontium was expected to be sequestered by coprecipitation with CaCO3, but the results suggested that coprecipitation was not an effective sequestration mechanism in this system. In addition, spectral induced polarization (SIP) was used to monitor the spatial and temporal evolution of the reaction zone.
This paper is the second part of a two part sequence on multiphysics algorithms and software. The first [1] focused on the algorithms; this part treats the multiphysics software framework and applications based on it. Tight coupling is typically designed into the analysis application at inception, as such an application is strongly tied to a composite nonlinear solver that arrives at the final solution by treating all equations simultaneously. The application must also take care to minimize both time and space error between the physics, particularly if more than one mesh representation is needed in the solution process. This paper presents an application framework that was specifically designed to support tightly coupled multiphysics analysis. The Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) is based on the Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) method combined with physics-based preconditioning to provide the underlying mathematical structure for applications. The report concludes with the presentation of a host of nuclear, energy and environmental applications that demonstrate the efficacy of the approach and the utility of a well-designed multiphysics framework.
Formation of mineral precipitates in the mixing interface between two reactant solutions flowing in parallel in porous media is governed by reactant mixing by diffusion and dispersion and is coupled to changes in porosity/permeability due to precipitation. The spatial and temporal distribution of mixing-dependent precipitation of barium sulfate in porous media was investigated with side-by-side injection of barium chloride and sodium sulfate solutions in thin rectangular flow cells packed with quartz sand. The results for homogeneous sand beds were compared to beds with higher or lower permeability inclusions positioned in the path of the mixing zone. In the homogeneous and high permeability inclusion experiments, BaSO 4 precipitate (barite) formed in a narrow deposit along the length and in the center of the solution-solution mixing zone even though dispersion was enhanced within, and downstream of, the high permeability inclusion. In the low permeability inclusion experiment, the deflected BaSO 4 precipitation zone broadened around one side and downstream of the inclusion and was observed to migrate laterally toward the sulfate solution. A continuum-scale fully coupled reactive transport model that simultaneously solves the nonlinear governing equations for fluid flow, transport of reactants and geochemical reactions was used to simulate the experiments and provide insight into mechanisms underlying the experimental observations. Migration of the precipitation zone in the low permeability inclusion experiment could be explained by the coupling effects among fluid flow, reactant transport and localized mineral precipitation reaction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.