1 research outputs found
Experimental investigation of solubility trapping in 3D printed micromodels
Understanding interfacial mass transfer during dissolution of gas in a liquid
is vital for optimising large-scale carbon capture and storage operations.
While the dissolution of CO2 bubbles in reservoir brine is a crucial mechanism
towards safe CO2 storage, it is a process that occurs at the pore-scale and is
not yet fully understood. Direct numerical simulation (DNS) models describing
this type of dissolution exist and have been validated with semi-analytical
models on simple cases like a rising bubble in a liquid column. However, DNS
models have not been experimentally validated for more complicated scenarios
such as dissolution of trapped CO2 bubbles in pore geometries where there are
few experimental datasets. In this work we present an experimental and
numerical study of trapping and dissolution of CO2 bubbles in 3D printed
micromodel geometries. We use 3D printing technology to generate three
different geometries, a single cavity geometry, a triple cavity geometry and a
multiple channel geometry. In order to investigate the repeatability of the
trapping and dissolution experimental results, each geometry is printed three
times and three identical experiments are performed for each geometry. The
experiments are performed at low capillary number representative of flow during
CO2 storage applications. DNS simulations are then performed and compared with
the experimental results. Our results show experimental reproducibility and
consistency in terms of CO2 trapping and the CO2 dissolution process. At such
low capillary number, our numerical simulator cannot model the process
accurately due to parasitic currents and the strong time step constraints
associated with capillary waves. However, we show that, for the single and
triple cavity geometry