Non-monotonic impact of erosion on solute dispersion in porous media

Ali Saeibehrouzi; Soroush Abolfathi; Petr Denissenko; Ran Holtzman

doi:10.1029/2024GL114312

Non-monotonic impact of erosion on solute dispersion in porous media

Ali Saeibehrouzi, Soroush Abolfathi, Petr Denissenko, Ran Holtzman

Research Centre for Fluid and Complex Systems

University of Warwick

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

38 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Flow through a granular, natural porous media can erode it chemically by dissolving and thus shrinking the solid particles, or mechanically, by removing them. The two-way interplay between the transport of fluids and dissolved solutes and alteration of the porous structure and hence the medium's transport properties is of interest to processes ranging from subsurface energy storage to contamination in groundwater. Here, we conduct a quantitative pore-scale analysis through a combination of numerical simulations and microfluidic experiments. We find that erosion enhances solute dispersion at low Pe (diffusion-dominated) and diminishes it at high Pe. Residence time distribution reveals that mechanical erosion tends to induce non-Fickian transport more than chemical erosion, which we attribute to the differences in their effects on pore size distribution.

Original language	English
Article number	e2024GL114312
Pages (from-to)	104773
Number of pages	1
Journal	Geophysical Research Letters
Volume	52
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL114312
Publication status	Published - 28 Feb 2025

Bibliographical note

© 2025. The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Funding

The authors acknowledge resources and support from the Scientific Computing Research Technology Platform (SCRTP) at the University of Warwick, and the HPC facility at the Faculty of Engineering, Environment, and Computing, Coventry University. RH acknowledges support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/V050613/1). SA acknowledges funding support from the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/S007350/1).

Funders	Funder number
Coventry University
University of Warwick
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council	EP/V050613/1
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Natural Environment Research Council	NE/S007350/1
Natural Environment Research Council

Keywords

direct simulation
dispersion
effective diffusivity
erosion
porous media
transport

Access to Document

10.1029/2024GL114312Licence: CC BY

Saeibehrouzi_GRLAccepted author manuscript, 7.98 MB
Holtzman2025VORFinal published version, 2.71 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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Non-monotonic impact of erosion on solute dispersion in porous media

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

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