Numerical modeling of compositional two-phase reactive transport in porous media with phase change phenomena including an application in nuclear waste disposal

Non-isothermal compositional two-phase flow is considered to be one of the fundamental physical processes in the field of water resources research. The strong non-linearity and discontinuity emerging from phase transition phenomena pose a serious challenge for numerical modeling. Recently, Lauser et al.[1] has proposed a numerical scheme, namely the Nonlinear Complementary Problem (NCP), to handle this strong non-linearity. In this work, the NCP is implemented at both local and global levels of a Finite element algorithm. In the former case, the NCP is integrated into the local thermodynamic equilibrium calculation. While in the latter one, it is formulated as one of the governing equations. The two different formulations have been investigated through several well established benchmarks and analyzed for their efficiency and robustness. In the second part of the thesis, the presented numerical formulations are applied for application and process studies in the context of nuclear waste disposal in Switzerland. Application studies comprehend the coupling between multiphase transport model and complex bio-geo-chemical process to investigate the degradation of concrete material due to two major reactions: carbonation and Aggregate Silica Reaction(ASR). The chemical processes are simplified into a lookup table and cast into the transport model via source and sink term. The efficiency and robustness of the look-up table are further compared with a fully reactive transport model

Determination of the Local Standard of Rest using the LSS-GAC DR1

We re-estimate the peculiar velocity of the Sun with respect to the local standard of rest using a sample of local stars within 600 pc of the Sun, selected from the LAMOST Spectroscopic Survey of the Galactic Anti-centre (LSS-GAC). The sample consists of 94332 FGK main-sequence stars with well-determined radial velocities and atmospheric parameters. To derive the LSR, two independent analyses are applied to the data. Firstly, we determine the solar motion by comparing the observed velocity distribution to that generated with the analytic formulism of Schonrich & Binney that has been demonstrated to show excellent agreement with rigorous torus-based dynamics modelling by Binney & McMillan. Secondly, we propose that cold populations of thin disc stars, selected by applying an orbital eccentricity cut, can be directly used to determine the LSR without the need of asymmetric drift corrections. Both approaches yield consistent results of solar motion in the direction of Galactic rotation, V_sun, that are much higher than the standard value adopted hitherto, derived from Stromgren's equation. The newly deduced values of V_sun are 1-2 km/s smaller than the more recent estimates derived from the Geneva-Copenhagen Survey sample of stars in the solar neighbourhood (within 100 pc). We attribute the small difference to the presence of several well-known moving groups in the GCS sample that, fortunately, hardly affect the LSS-GAC sample. The newly derived radial and vertical components of the solar motion agree well with the previous studies. In addition, for all components of the solar motion, the values yielded by stars of different spectral types in the LSS-GAC sample are consistent with each other, suggesting that the local disk is well relaxed and that the LSR reported in the current work is robust. Our final recommended LSR is, (U,V,W)_sun = (7.01+/-0.20, 10.13+/-0.12, 4.95+/-0.09) km/s.Comment: MNRAS accepted, 13 pages, 11 figures, 7 table