Pore scale modeling and evaluation of clogging behavior of salt crystal aggregates in CO2-rich phase during carbon storage

Precipitation-induced Geometry Evolution in Porous Media: Numerical and Experimental Insights based on New Model on Probabilistic Nucleation and Mineral Growth

“…In the proposed model and the LBM implementation, both location and time of nucleation are probabilistic (spatiotemporal stochastic dynamics), which may significantly impact the evolution of transport properties across time and length scales. More about probabilistic nucleation and how to implement it into pore-scale reactive transport models can be found in our previous works [8,10,12,22].…”

“…Subsurface reactive fluid flow and solute transport is central to several pressing energy, environment, and societal challenges, including the geological storage of carbon dioxide (CO2). Mineral nucleation and growth is a prime example of interface-coupled dissolution and precipitation (ICDP) reactions giving rise to geometry evolution in porous media [1,[6][7][8][9][10][11]. When precipitation reactions are ample, crystal accumulations can dramatically reduce porosity (amount of void space) [8,10,12].…”

“…Mineral nucleation and growth is a prime example of interface-coupled dissolution and precipitation (ICDP) reactions giving rise to geometry evolution in porous media [1,[6][7][8][9][10][11]. When precipitation reactions are ample, crystal accumulations can dramatically reduce porosity (amount of void space) [8,10,12]. Alteration in pore volume, in turn, changes the connectivity of the pore space [13,14].…”

“…The nucleus may form in the bulk of a fluid called homogeneous nucleation or form at the solid-liquid interface called heterogeneous nucleation. The probabilistic nucleation model has been adopted for studying CO2-induced clogging in porous media [10] and the impact of heterogeneous substrate properties [22], for investigating ICDP with a micro-continuum approach [1], for pore-scale modeling of crystal nucleation and growth [39,40]. The new probabilistic nucleation and growth model may receive experimental inputs describing the relationship between experimental/deterministic induction time (τN) and the probabilistic induction time (τP) for constructing process-specific probability distribution functions of forming a nucleus [12].…”

“…Porosity-permeability relations used in continuum scale modeling to account for precipitation/dissolution are examples of this upscaling between two domains. However, none of the available porosity-permeability relationships have taken into account the probabilistic dynamics and dimensionality [10].…”