Effects of medium and pore‐fluid compressibility on chemical‐dissolution front instability in fluid‐saturated porous media

Theoretical analysis and computational simulations have been carried out to investigate how medium and pore‐fluid compressibility affects the chemical‐dissolution front propagation, which is associated with a fully‐coupled nonlinear problem between porosity, pore‐fluid pressure, pore‐fluid density and reactive chemical‐species transport within a deformable and fluid‐saturated porous medium. When the fully‐coupled nonlinear system is in a subcritical state, some analytical solutions have been derived for a special case, in which the ratio of the equilibrium concentration to the solid molar density of the chemical species is approaching zero. To investigate the effect of either medium compressibility or pore‐fluid compressibility on the evolutions of chemical dissolution fronts in supercritical chemical dissolution systems, numerical algorithms and procedures have been also proposed. The related theoretical and numerical results have demonstrated that: (i) not only can pore‐fluid compressibility affect the propagating speeds of chemical dissolution fronts in both subcritical and supercritical systems, but also it can affect the growth and amplitudes of irregular chemical dissolution fronts in supercritical systems; (ii) medium compressibility may have a little influence on the propagating speeds of chemical dissolution fronts, but it can have significant effects on the growth and amplitudes of irregular chemical dissolution fronts in supercritical systems; and (iii) both medium and pore‐fluid compressibility may stabilize irregular chemical‐dissolution‐fronts in supercritical chemical dissolution systems. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.