Regular Article
Digital Rock Physics: computation of hydrodynamic dispersion
1
Earth Sciences Institute of Orléans, CNRS-Université d’Orléans-BRGM, 45100 Orléans, France
2
Laboratoire GéHCO, Campus Grandmont, Université de Tours, 37200 Tours, France
* Corresponding author: cyprien.soulaine@cnrs-orleans.fr
Received:
10
February
2021
Accepted:
26
May
2021
Hydrodynamic dispersion is a crucial mechanism for modelling contaminant transport in subsurface engineering and water resources management whose determination remains challenging. We use Digital Rock Physics (DRP) to evaluate the longitudinal dispersion of a sandpack. From a three-dimensional image of a porous sample obtained with X-ray microtomography, we use the method of volume averaging to assess the longitudinal dispersion. Our numerical implementation is open-source and relies on a modern scientific platform that allows for large computational domains and High-Performance Computing. We verify the robustness of our model using cases for which reference solutions exist and we show that the longitudinal dispersion of a sandpack scales as a power law of the Péclet number. The assessment methodology is generic and applies to any kind of rock samples.
© C. Soulaine et al., published by IFP Energies nouvelles, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
