CAMPOS Research Colloquium
Verónica Morales Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
May 18, 2022
Groundwater Flow and Mass Transport in Structurally Complex Porous Media
Accurately describing the flow of and mass transport in porous media is central to many environmental applications spanning groundwater hydrology, oil recovery and geotechnics. Flow and transport phenomena significantly differ between simple and complex porous media. The complexity of the pore-space gives rise to convoluted flow paths that can span from extremely fast to extremely slow. Such flow organization complicates transport behavior and creates reaction hotspots that are difficult to predict. To this end, this talk will discuss work carried out to understand large-scale behavior as a reflection of the millions of interactions between the moving fluid and the pore-spaces of the medium. The first part of the talk recasts flow resistance as a graph-theory problem. Through this we learn where and why preferential flow paths form based on information about the pore-structure. The second part of the talk discusses the controls for rock dissolution behavior during CO2 geologic sequestration. This work sheds light on the domino effect that flow, transport and mixing have on reaction outcomes, and presents a predictive model that describes accurately reaction-rate inhibition and reaction-hotspot formation.
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