Simulation of chemical erosion in rough fractures

We report on numerical simulations of acid erosion in a fractured specimen of Carrara marble. The simulations combine two recent advances in lattice-Boltzmann methodology to accurately and efficiently calculate the velocity field in the pore space. A tracer diffusion algorithm was then used to calculate the distribution of reactants in the fracture, and the local erosion rate was obtained from the flux of tracer particles across the surfaces. Our results show that at large length scales, erosion leads to increased heterogeneity via channel formation, whereas at small length scales it tends to smooth out the roughness in the local aperture.