Numerical Modeling of Chemical Degradation of Concrete

The topic of the dissertation is the numerical simulation of a two-phase flow of water and air in a porous medium coupled with the transport of chemicals present in one or both phases and chemical reactions that can affect porosity. We showcase our model on the laboratory experiment on the accelerated carbonation of the concrete, and on scenarios from the SiTraM benchmark. The system is discretized using the finite volume scheme and implemented in the simulation framework DUNE. Special attention is paid to the regularization of nonlinearities and degenerate parts of the system. We add a projection step into the nonlinear solver (Newton or RASPEN) to address the convergence issues caused by the strong reaction terms, and use complementarity constraints to deal with the phase disappearance degeneracy.