Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

Dissolution in porous media emerges from the interplay of fluid flow, reactant transport, chemical reactions, and evolving structure. Reactant transport combines advection and diffusion: advection promotes channeling instabilities, whereas diffusion stabilizes fronts. Pore network models provide an efficient framework to simulate dissolution, but often assume advection-dominated axial transport in pores—an assumption frequently violated in natural and industrial systems such as groundwater flows or catalytic reactors.
In this seminar I first motivate the need to include axial diffusion in pore network models and derive the classical Graetz solution for advection–reaction in a cylindrical pore with reactive walls. I next show how retaining axial diffusion modifies the solution structure, inducing additional dependence on Damköhler and Péclet numbers. Building on this, I present a solution to the 1D advection–diffusion–reaction problem for pores in the network that incorporates axial diffusion. Finally, I map dissolution outcomes on Damköhler–Péclet phase diagrams, highlighting transitions in morphology and comparing them with laboratory benchmarks.