On the stability of carbon sequestration in an anisotropic horizontal porous layer with a first-order chemical reaction

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) sequestration in deep saline aquifers is considered to be one of the most promising solutions to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As the concentration of dissolved CO₂ increases in unsaturated brine, the density increases and the system may ultimately become unstable, and it may initiate convection. In this article, we study the stability of convection in an anisotropic horizontal porous layer, where the solute is assumed to decay via a first-order chemical reaction. We perform linear and nonlinear stability analyses based on the steady-state concentration field to assess neutral stability curves as a function of the anisotropy ratio, Damköhler number and Rayleigh number. We show that anisotropy in permeability and solutal diffusivity play an important role in convective instability. It is shown that when solutal horizontal diffusivity is larger than the vertical diffusivity, varying the ratio of vertical to horizontal permeabilities does not significantly affect the behaviour of instability. It is also noted that, when horizontal permeability is higher than the vertical permeability, varying the ratio of vertical to horizontal solutal diffusivity does have a substantial effect on the instability of the system when the reaction rate is dominated by the diffusion rate. We used the Chebyshev-tau method coupled with the QZ algorithm to solve the eigenvalue problem obtained from both the linear and nonlinear stability theories.