Upscaling and large-scale modeling of the dissolution of gypsum cavities

Abstract

The dissolution of geological formations containing gypsum can rapidly create various karstic features, and may potentially generate great risks such as subsidence and collapse [1]. To understand the gypsum dissolution mechanism is very important to develop safety measures. It is not feasible to take into account all the pore-scale details at a large-scale by direct numerical modeling, and some sort of macro-scale models are essential. Such a macro-scale porous medium model can also serve as a diffuse interface model to describe the dissolution at a fluid/solid interface, as done in [2]. The objective of this study is to develop a macro-scale model, starting from the pore-scale transport problem with boundary condition corresponding to non-linear reaction or thermodynamic equilibrium, making use of the method of volume averaging [3], and then implement it for a large-scale cavity dissolution modeling