Investigation of the influence of fluid flow on the mass transport of dissolved calcite ions on the microscale using 3D numerical simulation

Abstract

The study and understanding of material dissolution plays an important role in environmental sciences, e.g. in the study of pipeline corrosion, reservoir development or nuclear waste storage. Commonly laboratory based experiments or numerical simulations in the meter scale are carried out to verify the resistivity of a material with regard to corrosion. However, it is challenging to directly determine the influence of the fluid movement on the relation of advective and diffusive mass transport on the µm scale. In order to overcome this difficulty we use a 3D numerical hydrodynamic continuum model by which the fluid flow and the mass transport over a pyrochlore surface are simulated. Using the finite volume method implemented in the open-source software CFD-package OpenFOAM, we investigated the hydrodynamic flow over three pyrochlore surfaces of varying surface roughness under steady-state flow conditions. The mass transport over the surfaced was further computed using the steady-state flow field. As may be expected the diffusive transport appeared to become lower with increasing flow velocity, but interestingly also as the surface roughness increased. Apart from that, we observed typical fluid dynamical features like the development of cavity flows in the surface depressions. Although the transport simulations show no influence of these hydrodynamic features, the mass transport changes with the flow velocity and surface roughness, with a higher release of dissolved calcite ions being observed at lower velocities and a lower surface roughness. Comment: The data in these archives contains case file for numerical studies in OpenFOAM to investigate the scope described above. Archives are split between three different surface topographies. The fourth archive contains data from post-processing

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