New SFB 1313 publication, published in the scientific journal Water Resources Research. The work has been developed in the context of the SFB 1313 research project .
Authors
Abstract
The objective of this study is to develop a new quasi-static pore-network model (QSPNM) that captures the key pore-scale physics of evaporation-driven salt transport and precipitation in porous media under capillary-dominated conditions, while remaining computationally efficient enough to enable systematic parameter studies on large pore-network structures. The proposed QSPNM framework incorporates advective salt transport through corner flow, thereby addressing a critical limitation of existing quasi-static models. A time-integrated liquid-flux approximation is derived for flow within the interconnected liquid phase, providing the advective fluxes required to simulate coupled advective–diffusive salt transport and precipitation. The QSPNM framework is subsequently compared with a fully implicit dynamic pore-network model (DPNM) using several benchmark cases involving both pure-water and brine evaporation. The numerical convergence and computational efficiency of the two modeling approaches are also systematically evaluated. Finally, the enhanced computational capability of the QSPNM is demonstrated by applying it to a larger pore network. The results illustrate its potential for simulating realistic porous media for which fully dynamic models may be computationally prohibitive. This capability provides a robust pore-scale foundation for developing improved constitutive relationships and upscaling strategies for representative elementary volume-scale descriptions of evaporation-driven salt precipitation in porous media.