Investigation of a Conservative Finite Volume Scheme for Flows in Karstified Porous Media

Karstic geometries represent a distinct configuration characterized by the presence of conduits/channels (or vugs/chambers) intertwined within a porous medium. Modeling flow through such reservoirs poses a significant challenge, resulting in limited predictive capabilities regarding flow and transport processes. In this work, we formulate a finite-volume-mass conservative treatment for karst-matrix coupling. The designed scheme allows for handling complex geometrical karst configurations that contain volume cells significantly smaller than the underlying matrix, thereby increasing the applicability of the proposed model to the simulation of realistic karstified porous media problems. The investigated model is applied to different porous media configurations, with numerical results compared against reference solutions and verified by mass conservation evaluation.