Reactions in subsurface environments are often controlled by the mixing of reactive species. In engineered systems where reactants are injected into the subsurface, chemical or physical gradients can result in heterogeneous distributions of reaction products and/or rates. When reaction products cause changes in physical properties of the medium, the additional level of coupling between chemical and transport processes is difficult to simulate or account for by volume averaging. This is the case for scenarios where the induction of mineral forming reactions is desired in order to reduce contaminant mobility via chemical complexation or modification of flow paths. The engineering challenge is to understand how these reactions can be propagated in complex heterogeneous media to produce the desired outcomes. Different reactant mixing scenarios to promote mineral precipitation are being tested in intermediate scale flow cells and simulated using a massively parallel, fully coupled and fully implicit approach.

Reactant mixing zones and mineral precipitation in porous media

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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