Abstract

The topic of geological carbon sequestration has provided ample motivation for both numerical and experimental studies of porous media convection, wherein the density contrasts of brine containing dissolved CO2 drive convective dynamics. Many studies to date have focussed on convection initiated at the interface between buoyant, single-phase CO2 and denser brine underneath. However, CO2 can also be capillary-trapped in the microscopic pore spaces of the reservoir, in effect leaving behind tiny ‘bubbles’ that are themselves soluble in the surrounding brine. In this talk I shall introduce a model of convection driven by such a process, and discuss the work that has gone into developing a code based on the open-source finite element solver FEniCS to tackle this problem computationally.