Authors: Scott L Painter
Publish Date: 2010/08/10
Volume: 15, Issue: 1, Pages: 69-85
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 threephase nonisothermal water dynamics in belowfreezing porous media have been undertaken This paper presents a nonisothermal threephase 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 finitevolume 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 freezinginduced water redistribution observed in laboratory experiments Simulations of Earth permafrost dynamics and of the formation and evolution of a planetaryscale cryosphere on Mars demonstrate the new capabilities
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