Modeling and upscaling precipitation-dissolution processes in porous media

We discuss the modeling of precipitation-dissolution processes on the pore-scale.
The model contains a free boundary which allows for changes in the pore volume and geometry,
which in turn lead to changes in effective properties of the medium such 
as porosity and permeability. We investigate how these effective properties change due to 
precipitation and dissolution by performing a formal homogenization procedure. In this way we 
obtain an upscaled model on the Darcy scale. The homogenized model falls in the class of 
distributed microstructure models. For certain simplifications the distributed microstructure 
model reduces to system of partial differential equations coupled with an ordinary
differential equation. In order to investigate how well the upscaled equations describe the 
behavior of the micro-scale model, we perform numerical experiments for a test problem.
We will also discuss how to apply our results to other processes that may affect the pore
volume and geometry such as biofilm growth and deposition.