Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Modeling carbonate growth in fractures and pores is important for understanding carbon sequestration in the environment or when supersaturated solutions are injected into rocks. Here we study the simple but nontrivial problem of calcite growth on fractures with rough walls of the same mineral using kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of attachment and detachment of molecules and scaling approaches. First we consider wedge-shaped fracture walls whose upper terraces are in the same low energy planes and show that the valleys are slowly filled by propagation of parallel monolayer steps in the wedge sides. The growth ceases when the walls reach these low energy configurations, so that a gap between the walls may not be filled. Secondly we consider fracture walls with equally separated monolayer steps (vicinal surfaces with roughness below $1$~nm) and show that growth by step propagation will eventually clog the fracture gap. In both cases, scaling approaches predict the times to attain the final configurations as a function of the initial geometry and of the step propagation velocity in the chosen supersaturation. The same reasoning applied to a random wall geometry shows that step propagation leads to lateral filling of surface valleys until the wall reaches the low-energy crystalline plane that has the smallest initial density of molecules. Thus, the final configurations of the fracture walls are much more sensitive to the crystallography than to the roughness or to the local curvature. The framework developed here may be used to determine those configurations, the times to reach them, and the mass of deposited mineral.
Source: Minerals
DOI: 10.3390/min14121213
Language: English
Subfield: Environmental Engineering
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,728
Funders: U.S. Department of Energy, University of Minnesota, International Social Science Council, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Fundação de Apoio à Pesquisa do Distrito Federal, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences
Awards: G1003967164, G1077579096, G1130075128, G1142195211, G1795177440, G1840770272, G196418854, G2311368543, G2338566269, G2461332186, G2464973817, G261677516, G266071807, G2733763810, G2823776494, G2944109003, G2976274460, G3325778992, G3496491966, G3594902027, G3644764444, G372778281, G4358690614, CENTER FOR INTERACTING GEO-PROCESSES IN MINERAL CARBON STORAGE, G4630578482, CENTER FOR INTERACTING GEO-PROCESSES IN MINERAL CARBON STORAGE, G4871895297, G5097367603, G5360797718, G5495070224, G5831762932, G593995186, G6026414660, G75178388, G8005828459, G8110027474, G8567052303, G8630059603, G886351101, G933372841, G991478101
OpenAlex ID: W4404828925