porousMedia4Foam: Multi-scale open-source platform for hydro-geochemical simulations with OpenFOAM®

Cyprien Soulaine (1, 2) , Saideep Pavuluri (1, 2, 3) , Francis Claret (3) , Christophe Tournassat (1, 2, 4)

1 ISTO - Institut des Sciences de la Terre d'Orléans - UMR7327
2 Milieux Poreux - UMR7327
3 BRGM - Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières (BRGM)
4 LBNL - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [Berkeley]

porousMedia4Foam is a package for solving flow and transport in porous media using OpenFOAM® - a popular open-source numerical toolbox. We introduce and highlight the features of a new generation open-source hydro-geochemical module implemented within porousMedia4Foam, which relies on micro-continuum concept and which makes it possible to investigate hydro-geochemical processes occurring at multiple scales i.e. at the pore-scale, reservoir-scale and at the hybrid-scale. Geochemistry is handled by a third party package (e.g. PHREEQC) that is coupled to the flow and transport solver of OpenFOAM®. We conducted benchmarks across different scales to validate the accuracy of our simulator. We further looked at the evolution of mineral dissolution/precipitation in a fractured porous system. Application fields of this new package include the investigation of hydro-bio-geochemical processes in the critical zone, the modelling of contaminant transport in aquifers, as well as and the assessment of confinement performance for geological barriers.

Keywords: Reactive Transport Modelling; Multi-scale simulations; Micro-continuum; OpenFOAM; PHREEQC

Domains: Sciences of the Universe [physics]

Cyprien Soulaine, Saideep Pavuluri, Francis Claret, Christophe Tournassat. porousMedia4Foam: Multi-scale open-source platform for hydro-geochemical simulations with OpenFOAM®. Environmental Modelling and Software, 2021, 145, pp.105199. ⟨10.1016/j.envsoft.2021.105199⟩. ⟨insu-03346087v2⟩