Uncertainty quantification for mineral precipitation and dissolution in fractured porous media

TL;DR

This paper applies uncertainty quantification techniques to reactive transport models in fractured porous media, emphasizing the importance of physical parameters and fracture geometry for reliable simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed-dimensional modeling approach combined with Polynomial Chaos expansion for global sensitivity analysis of uncertain parameters.

Findings

Fracture geometry significantly impacts transport behavior.

Polynomial Chaos effectively quantifies uncertainty in the model.

Sensitivity analysis identifies key parameters influencing precipitation and dissolution.

Abstract

In this work, we present an uncertainty quantification analysis to determine the influence and importance of some physical parameters in a reactive transport model in fractured porous media. An accurate description of flow and transport in the fractures is key to obtain reliable simulations, however, fractures geometry and physical characteristics pose several challenges from both the modeling and implementation side. We adopt a mixed-dimensional approximation, where fractures and their intersections are represented as objects of lower dimension. To simplify the presentation, we consider only two chemical species: one solute, transported by water, and one precipitate attached to the solid skeleton. A global sensitivity analysis to uncertain input data is performed exploiting the Polynomial Chaos expansion along with spectral projection methods on sparse grids.