A Lab on a Chip Experiment for Upscaling Diffusivity of Evolving Porous Media

Jenna Poonoosamy, Renchao Lu, Mara Iris Lönartz, Guido Deissmann, Dirk Bosbach and Yuankai Yang
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Jenna Poonoosamy: Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK-6), Nuclear Waste Management and Reactor Safety, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, 52425 Jülich, Germany
Renchao Lu: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
Mara Iris Lönartz: Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK-6), Nuclear Waste Management and Reactor Safety, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, 52425 Jülich, Germany
Guido Deissmann: Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK-6), Nuclear Waste Management and Reactor Safety, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, 52425 Jülich, Germany
Dirk Bosbach: Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK-6), Nuclear Waste Management and Reactor Safety, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, 52425 Jülich, Germany
Yuankai Yang: Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK-6), Nuclear Waste Management and Reactor Safety, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, 52425 Jülich, Germany

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 6, 1-18

Abstract: Reactive transport modelling is a powerful tool to assess subsurface evolution in various energy-related applications. Upscaling, i.e., accounting for pore scale heterogeneities into larger scale analyses, remains one of the biggest challenges of reactive transport modelling. Pore scale simulations capturing the evolutions of the porous media over a wide range of Peclet and Damköhler number in combination with machine learning are foreseen as an efficient methodology for upscaling. However, the accuracy of these pore scale models needs to be tested against experiments. In this work, we developed a lab on a chip experiment with a novel micromodel design combined with operando confocal Raman spectroscopy, to monitor the evolution of porous media undergoing coupled mineral dissolution and precipitation processes due to diffusive reactive fluxes. The 3D-imaging of the porous media combined with pore scale modelling enabled the derivation of upscaled transport parameters. The chemical reaction tested involved the replacement of celestine by strontianite, whereby a net porosity increase is expected because of the smaller molar volume of strontianite. However, under our experimental conditions, the accessible porosity and consequently diffusivity decreased. We propose a transferability of the concepts behind the Verma and Pruess relationship to be applied to also describe changes of diffusivity for evolving porous media. Our results highlight the importance of calibrating pore scale models with quantitative experiments prior to simulations over a wide range of Peclet and Damköhler numbers of which results can be further used for the derivation of upscaled parameters.

Keywords: reactive transport modelling; Archie’s law; microfluidic experiments; lattice Boltzmann simulation; porous media imaging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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