Abstract
Water in the subsurface of the Earth's cold regions-and possibly the subsurface of Mars-resides in the liquid, vapor, and ice phases. However, relatively few simulations addressing full three-phase, nonisothermal water dynamics in below-freezing porous media have been undertaken. This paper presents a nonisothermal, three-phase approach to modeling water migration in partially frozen porous media. Conservation equations for water (as ice, liquid, and vapor) and a single gas species (in the gas phase and dissolved in water) are coupled to a heat transport equation and solved by a finite-volume method with fully implicit time stepping. Particular attention is given to the method of spatial differencing when the pore space is partially filled with ice. The numerical model is able to reproduce freezing-induced water redistribution observed in laboratory experiments. Simulations of Earth permafrost dynamics and of the formation and evolution of a planetary-scale cryosphere on Mars demonstrate the new capabilities.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 69-85 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Computational Geosciences |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2011 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
Acknowledgements The author is grateful to Stuart Stothoff and Gary Walter for careful reviews of this manuscript. This work was supported by SwRI’s Southwest Initiative for Mars (SwIM™) under contract R9313 and by NASA Mars Fundamental Research Program award NNX06AB19G. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Keywords
- Freezing soils
- Mars
- Multiphase flow
- Permafrost