A multiscale quasilinear system for colloids deposition in porous media: Weak solvability and numerical simulation of a near-clogging scenario

Abstract

We study the weak solvability of a quasilinear reaction-diffusion system nonlinearly coupled with an linear elliptic system posed in a domain with distributed microscopic balls in $2D$. The size of these balls are governed by an ODE with direct feedback on the overall problem. The system describes the diffusion, aggregation, fragmentation, and deposition of populations of colloidal particles of various sizes inside a porous media made of prescribed arrangement of balls. The mathematical analysis of the problem relies on a suitable application of Schauder's fixed point theorem which also provides a convergent algorithm for an iteration method to compute finite difference approximations of smooth solutions to our multiscale model. Numerical simulations illustrate the behavior of the local concentration of the colloidal populations close to clogging situations.