Quantitative and qualitative study of density driven CO2 mass transfer in a vertical Hele-Shaw cell

Effect of diffusing layer thickness on the density-driven natural convection of miscible fluids in porous media: Modeling of mass transport

“…Two main configurations (De Paoli et al 2016;Hewitt et al 2013) were considered in previous studies depending on the boundary condition at the bottom boundary, namely, the so-called "one-sided" cell, in which the Neumann boundary condition (i.e., no concentration gradient) is imposed at the bottom boundary (Pau et al 2010;Neufeld et al 2010;Slim 2014;Xu et al 2006;De Paoli et al 2017), and the so-called "two-sided" cell, in which the Dirichlet boundary condition (i.e., constant concentrations) is imposed at the top and bottom boundaries (Otero et al 2004;Hewitt et al 2012;Wen et al 2013). Based on theoretical analyses (Coskuner and Bentsen 1990;Hassanzadeh 2013, 2015;Rapaka et al 2008) , numerical simulations Ghesmat et al 2010;Hassanzadeh et al 2007;Hewitt et al 2012Hewitt et al , 2013Hidalgo and Carrera 2009;Hidalgo et al 2015;Otero et al 2004;Pau et al 2010;Riaz et al 2006;Shahraeeni et al 2015;Wen et al 2012;Xie et al 2011), and laboratory experiments including the construction of a nonlinear density profile of a mixture of miscible fluids (Backhaus et al 2011;Faisal et al 2015;Huppert and Neufeld 2014;Hidalgo et al 2012;Neufeld et al 2010;Wang et al 2016), mass transport is modeled as a function of Rayleigh number, because the time required for the shift in trapping mechanism scales with mass flux. In the Rayleigh-Taylor model, Rayleigh-Taylor instability (Kolditz et al 1998) occurs on the interface that separates a lighter fluid from a heavier one located above it, and the fluids convectively mix with each other (Manickam and Homsy 1995;…”

Refractive‐Light‐Transmission Technique Applied to Density‐Driven Convective Mixing in Porous Media With Implications for Geological CO2 Storage

“…A few different types of experimental methods have been used to address these challenges. These methods include PVT cell experiments (Farajzadeh et al, ; Gholami et al, ; Khosrokhavar et al, ; Yang & Gu, ); analogue Hele‐Shaw cell experiments (Backhaus et al, ; Faisal et al, ; Kneafsey & Pruess, ; Slim et al, ); bead pack experiments (Agartan et al, ; MacMinn et al, ; MacMinn & Juanes, ; Neufeld et al, ) or combinations thereof (Kneafsey & Pruess, ; MacMinn & Juanes, ; Moghaddam et al, ; Mojtaba et al, ; Tsai et al, ). PVT cell experiments with CO 2 ‐brine systems enable easy quantification of global measures such as the total dissolved mass and mass transfer rate under thermodynamic reservoir conditions, but they have limited ability to visualize the convective process.…”

“…The shadowgraph was also adopted (Backhaus et al, ; Tsai et al, ) to track the interface movement for analogue fluid experiments from which scaling laws for the convective mass flux were derived. For some experiments that utilized reflection or light‐transmission (LT) techniques, pH‐indicators were used to visualize the convective process (Faisal et al, ; Kneafsey & Pruess, ; Mojtaba et al, ) and assess finger characteristics (Faisal et al, ; Kneafsey & Pruess, ). However, in order to also quantify the mass transfer catalytic combustion‐based total carbon (TC) analyzer (Faisal et al, ) or PVT cell measurements (Kneafsey & Pruess, ; Mojtaba et al, ) were conducted.…”

Numerical sensitivity analysis of density driven CO2 convection with respect to different modeling and boundary conditions

“…2a). To improve the agreement between the physical model used in numerical simulation and the experiments, we applied the methodology developed by Detwiler et al [26] to measure the aperture variations in the whole Hele-Shaw cell [27]. The measurements were used to calculate numerical non-uniform permeability fields representative of the aperture variation in the experimental Hele-Shaw cells (Fig.…”

“…As the total dissolved CO 2 mass was determined experimentally only for the 1 mm-and 0.7 mm-gap Hele-Shaw cell configurations [27], we can just compare the numerical mass transfer results with the experimental values for these two configurations. For the two other experimental configurations (b = 0.5 mm and b = 0.3 mm), only the timescale and convection patterns are available for comparison.…”