Executive Summary : | Multiphase flow in porous media is important in a variety of practical applications including CO2 sequestration, groundwater flow and contaminant transport, hydrocarbon recovery, nuclear waste disposal, etc. In addition to transport, geochemical interactions become very important in some of these applications. For example, CO2 injected in the subsurface for geological sequestration undergoes a variety of chemical reactions with pore fluids and minerals. These reactions can alter the properties of porous media including reducing the rock permeability, mechanical integrity of near well bore region, etc. Similarly, groundwater contaminant undergoes various reactions with pore fluids and minerals including ion exchange and precipitation/dissolution reactions. To understand these processes and to be able to make reasonable predictions about their long-term behavior, a numerical simulator is often needed. Most existing simulators are able to either model multiphase flow in the absence of reactions or reactions in single phase flow. Some reported simulators can model reactions but they are limited to one dimension and can model a limited set of reactions. Some advanced simulators, such as UTCHEM and TOUGHREACT, can model multiphase flow with reactions but are available to closed group of users (university/national lab users) and need further improvements. For example, UTCHEM is unable to include the effect of wettability of porous media or surface passivation when modeling reactions. In our recent work, we developed a one-dimensional numerical simulator to model multiphase flow with reactions in porous media and included the effect of wettability on reactions. However, only a few key reactions were included. In this work, we propose to develop a two-dimensional numerical simulator and focus our attention on making the reaction module more robust so that any number of desired reactions can be included in the simulations; including aqueous reactions, precipitation/dissolution reactions, ion exchange reactions, etc. Such a tool is extremely powerful and is not easily available. Furthermore, unlike other existing simulator, we plan to include the effect of rock wettability on surface reactions in the proposed simulator. |