Flow and transport modelling in highly heterogeneous geological porous mediaTools Pescimoro, Eugenio (2023) Flow and transport modelling in highly heterogeneous geological porous media. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractFlow and transport processes through porous media are ubiquitous both in natural and industrial environments. Ranging from diffusion in human tissue to oil recovery and CO2 storage, including the design of porous reactors, geothermal energy production, groundwater remediation, oil recovery and CO2 storage, the characterisation of fluid flow and solute transport at different scales represents the paradigm to better understand the mechanisms at the base of several processes. Due to the broad spectrum of applications, a vast empirical and numerical research field developed around transport in heterogeneous porous media. While on the numerical side, the mathematical models available for simulating transport at the micro and meso scales have shown good agreement with the empirical tests, the debate around modelling transport at the macro-scale is still open. One example is the unknown relation between system parameters and their values measured at different scales which is usually addressed as scale effect. Other examples are anomalous or non-Fickian transport phenomena and the validity range of macro-scale transport models. Our study focuses on the impact of the heterogeneous distribution of the subsurface properties on the transport of solute at the macro-scale. Initially we propose an analysis of transport in heterogeneous porous media generated with a random geostatistical algorithm. Subsequently this subject is expanded and applied to a real domain which was surveyed and reconstructed with a high level of resolution. Three-dimensional meso-scale numerical simulations performed with our open-source C++ library, built on top of the finite-volume library OpenFOAM, represent the main source of data to test macro-scale mathematical models.
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