Efficient flow and transport simulations in reconstructed 3D pore geometries

Upscaling pore-scale processes into macroscopic quantities such as hydrodynamic dispersion is still not a straightforward matter for porous media with complex pore space geometries. Recently it has become possible to obtain very realistic 3D geometries for the pore system of real rocks using either numerical reconstruction or micro-CT measurements. In this work, we present a finite element–finite volume simulation method for modeling single-phase fluid flow and solute transport in experimentally obtained 3D pore geometries. Algebraic multigrid techniques and parallelization allow us to solve the Stokes and advection–diffusion equations on large meshes with several millions of elements. We apply this method in a proof-of-concept study of a digitized Fontainebleau sandstone sample. We use the calculated velocity to simulate pore-scale solute transport and diffusion. From this, we are able to calculate the a priori emergent macroscopic hydrodynamic dispersion coefficient of the porous medium for a given molecular diffusion Dm of the solute species. By performing this calculation at a range of flow rates, we can correctly predict all of the observed flow regimes from diffusion dominated to convection dominated.

Research highlights
► Developed an efficient workflow for transforming the X-Ray CT measurements of the porous rocks to a numerical flow model.
► Combined finite element, finite volume, algebraic multigrid methods and domain decomposition.
► Performed an upscaling of the model dispersivity and analysed its behavior with respect to the induced flow regime.
► Demonstrated a sensitivity of the computations to the accuracy of the pore geometry representation.