Scaling of Convective Mixing in Porous Media
Name
Hidalgo-2012-Scaling of Convective Mixing in Porous Media.pdf
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Author(s)
Hidalgo, Juan J.
Fe, Jaime
Cueto-Felgueroso, Luis
Juanes, Ruben
Date Issued
December 2012
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Hidalgo, Juan J. et al. “Scaling of Convective Mixing in Porous Media.” Physical Review Letters 109.26 (2012). © 2012 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Convective mixing in porous media is triggered by a Rayleigh-Bénard-type hydrodynamic instability as a result of an unstable density stratification of fluids. While convective mixing has been studied extensively, the fundamental behavior of the dissolution flux and its dependence on the system parameters are not yet well understood. Here, we show that the dissolution flux and the rate of fluid mixing are determined by the mean scalar dissipation rate. We use this theoretical result to provide computational evidence that the classical model of convective mixing in porous media exhibits, in the regime of high Rayleigh number, a dissolution flux that is constant and independent of the Rayleigh number. Our findings support the universal character of convective mixing and point to the need for alternative explanations for nonlinear scalings of the dissolution flux with the Rayleigh number, recently observed experimentally.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.264503
