On Thursday, 7th July 2022, Felix Weinhardt, doctoral student at the Department of Hydromechanics and Modelling of Hydrosystems (LH2) and within SFB 1313 will defend his doctoral thesis entitled "Porosity and permeability alterations in processes of biomineralization in porous media – microfluidic investigations and their interpretation".
Date: Thursday, 7th July 2022
Time: 2:00 pm
Place: MML, U. 1.003, Pfaffenwaldring 61, 70569 Stuttgart
Abstract
Biomineralization can be employed as a promising engineering application with the potential, to seal leakage pathways in the subsurface or to stabilize soils. As any application, biomineralization requires predictive planning, for which numerical simulations at the scale of representative elementary volumes (REV) are a valuable tool. For that, the considered domain is subdivided into several REV’s, which do not resolve the pore space in detail but represent it by averaged parameters, such as the porosity and permeability. The application of biomineralization in porous media results in a change in porosity which consequently also affects permeability. The change in permeability is usually described as a function of porosity for REV-scale simulations, utilizing some constitutive relationships.
Thus, while REV-scale models are essential tools to support field applications of biomineralization, they inherently rely on porosity-permeability relationships to describe their impact on permeability. However, it is the pore scale where processes occur and from where we expect to obtain increased knowledge on the permeability change due to biomineralization for REV-scale modeling. Recent studies have shown that microfluidics is a suitable experimental technique for exploring the pore-scale characteristics during the biomineralization process. The effect of biomineralization on the hydraulic responses has still not yet been fully understood. This current lack of knowledge motivated our work on porosity and permeability alterations during biomineralization in porous media. Therefore, we studied biomineralization on the pore scale, identifying pore-scale processes and phenomena determining their impact on the change of the REV-scale properties porosity and permeability.
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