Coupled multi-physics and non-equilibrium thermodynamics of geo-materials

Poromechanics has been successful in solving many modern problems related to resource engineering such as solution mining, oil and gas, carbon dioxide storage, geothermal harnessing and so on, in spite of the limitation of the numerical tools that have been used. These numerical tools are generally based on decoupled or partially coupled approaches. They are limited to small perturbations and focus only on equilibrium thermodynamics of chemical processes, if any. A pioneering approach of reactive transport in porous media has been introduced recently by the author (Karrech et al. 2012a,b), which overcomes those limitations. These contributions extend classical approaches by taking into account large transformations, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and fully coupled processes.