Modeling of Calcite Precipitation Driven by Bacteria-facilitated Urea Hydrolysis in A Flow Column Using A Fully Coupled, Fully Implicit Parallel Reactive Transport Simulator

One approach for immobilizing subsurface metal contaminants involves stimulating the in situ production of mineral phases that sequester or isolate contaminants. One example is using calcium carbonate to immobilize strontium. The success of such approaches depends on understanding how various processes of flow, transport, reaction and resulting porosity-permeability change couple in subsurface systems. Reactive transport models are often used for such purpose. Current subsurface reactive transport simulators typically involve a de-coupled solution approach, such as operator-splitting, that solves the transport equations for components and batch chemistry sequentially, which has limited applicability for many biogeochemical processes with fast kinetics and strong medium property-reaction interactions. A massively parallel, fully coupled, fully implicit reactive transport simulator has been developed based on a parallel multi-physics object oriented software environment computing framework (MOOSE) developed at the Idaho National Laboratory. Within this simulator, the system of transport and reaction equations is solved simultaneously in a fully coupled manner using the Jacobian Free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) method with preconditioning. The simulator was applied to model reactive transport in a one-dimensional column where conditions that favor calcium carbonate precipitation are generated by urea hydrolysis that is catalyzed by urease enzyme. Simulation results are compared to both laboratory column experiments and those obtained using the reactive transport simulator STOMP in terms of: the spatial and temporal distributions of precipitates and reaction rates and other major species in the reaction system; the changes in porosity and permeability; and the computing efficiency based on wall clock simulation time.