Surface Instabilities during Mineral Precipitation in Reactive Flow

Modeling mineral precipitation in reactive flow is a complex process which includes heterogeneous crystal nucleation, crystal growth, and species transport. Usually, tracking the dynamic boundaries between solid (substrate or mineral) and reactive fluid becomes a challenge. Particularly, the accurate representation of the interface becomes important in pore- and meso-scale studies, in which such phenomena as nucleation, surface instabilities, or charge distribution require robust definition of surface curvature and appropriate resolution.

This study presents coupling of the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian approach for tracking the surface with reactive transport to model evolution of solid interface during mineral precipitation. The results illustrate how the reaction and flow in the solution affect the appearance of instabilities during growth. Furthermore, the variation of flow velocities and reaction kinetics results in different topology of the precipitate. The observed differences in precipitate structure are expected to be an important benchmark for the reaction driven precipitation in natural environments.