A Level-Set Immersed Boundary Method for Reactive Transport in Complex Topologies with Moving Interfaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a level-set immersed boundary method for simulating reactive transport with moving interfaces in complex geometries, achieving second-order accuracy and validated through flow and crystal growth examples.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel LS-IBM framework that accurately models reactive transport with moving interfaces in porous media, including a new interface velocity propagation technique.

Findings

Achieves second-order spatial accuracy.

Effectively models flow and transport near evolving boundaries.

Validated with crystal growth and reactive boundary problems.

Abstract

A simulation framework based on the level-set and the immersed boundary methods (LS-IBM) has been developed for reactive transport problems in porous media involving a moving solid-fluid interface. The interface movement due to surface reactions is tracked by the level-set method, while the immersed boundary method captures the momentum and mass transport at the interface. The proposed method is capable of accurately modeling transport near evolving boundaries in Cartesian grids. The framework formulation guarantees second order accuracy in space. Since the interface velocity is only defined at the moving boundary, an interface velocity propagation method is also proposed. The method can be applied to other moving interface problems of the ``Stefan'' type. Here, we validate the proposed LS-IBM both for flow and transport close to an immersed object with reactive boundaries as well as for crystal growth. The proposed method provides a powerful tool to model more realistic problems involving moving reactive interfaces in complex domains.