On Multi-Component Gas Migration in Single-Phase Systems

The present work deals with diffusion of gases in fully saturated porous media. We test and validate the gas transport mechanism of dissolution and diffusion, implemented in the TH2M process class in the open-source finite-element software OpenGeoSys. We discuss the importance of gas diffusion for the integrity of the multi-barrier system. Furthermore, we present a multi-component mass balance equation implementation in Python, which serves as a reference for the two-component TH2M implementation and allows for a discussion of multi-component gas diffusion in liquids. We verify and validate the numerical implementations as follows: First, we come up with a set of numerical benchmarks in which solutions obtained by the two-component TH2M and multi-component implementations are compared. Thus, we show under which conditions predictions made by the TH2M model can be used for multi-component gas systems. Finally, the work is validated using a through diffusion experiment performed at Belgium’s Nuclear Research Centre SCK CEN and a sensitivity analysis is conducted based on the featured experiment. The results of this work illustrate that predictions by both the two- and four-component models match the laboratory findings very well. Therefore, we conclude that also the two-component implementation can reflect the multi-component processes well under the given constraints such as full saturation.