RDAFOAM: Numerical reactive transport modeling of the rotating disk experiment for carbonate acidizing

• Published in: Computers & geosciences 2023-09, Vol.178, p.105413, Article 105413
• Main Authors: Rabiee, Amirhossein, Khojastehmehr, Mohammad, Ghasemi, Esmaeil, Bazargan, Mohammad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acidizing; Computational fluid dynamics; Heterogeneous reaction; Levich; Rotating disk apparatus
• ISSN: 0098-3004; 1873-7803
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cageo.2023.105413

Designing a successful acidizing treatment requires understanding the chemical interactions between reactive fluid and reservoir rock. The rotating disk experiment is a common approach in the energy industry to study the kinetics of the reactions occurring in chemically reactive systems. The analytical solution of Levich—also known as the Levich equation—has been widely used to calculate the rate constants based on the dissolution rates measured by the rotating disk experiment. However, this equation might fail to produce correct results due to its simplifying assumptions. Ignoring species interactions, intra-aqueous reactions, energy transfer, two-phase flow, and the behavior of non-Newtonian fluids are sometimes inconsistent with real-world observations. Thus, it is important to develop a model that accounts for the different phenomena observed in this experiment. In this work, a numerical model is developed to simulate the rotating disk experiment using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The assumptions of this numerical model are the same as the Levich equation so that verification against the Levich equation is possible. This model sets the ground for further improvements that address the insufficiencies of the Levich equation. •Developing a numerical reactive transport model for simulating rotating disk experiments.•Programming an open-source C++ computational fluid dynamics OpenFOAM solver.•Model verification against the Levich equation.