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Viscous flow in three‐dimensional reconstructed porous media
Author(s) -
Pilotti Marco
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
international journal for numerical and analytical methods in geomechanics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.419
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1096-9853
pISSN - 0363-9061
DOI - 10.1002/nag.290
Subject(s) - porous medium , lattice boltzmann methods , mechanics , spheres , flow (mathematics) , mathematics , geometry , porosity , physics , classical mechanics , materials science , geology , geotechnical engineering , astronomy
In a recent paper Masad et al. (Int. J. Numer. Methods Eng. 2000; 26 : 53–74) have shown the possibility of numerically studying fluid flow within two‐dimensional microscopic images of granular materials. In this paper we investigate the possibility of computing the flow field at the pore scale within numerically reconstructed three dimensional porous media, by coupling a physically based sedimentation algorithm for porous media generation and a Lattice Boltzmann Technique for solving Navier equations for the monophasic flow of a newtonian fluid inside the intergranular space. Since the adopted sedimentation algorithm can produce porous media with a controlled level of complexity, we believe that this type of approach provides an ideal numerical laboratory to probe the effect of void space topology and geometry on the flow field. This should allow to understand the fluid‐dynamic implications of processes such as compaction and cementation. After showing that the Lattice Boltzmann Technique is effective in solving Navier equations in porous media also at moderately high Reynolds, where Darcy's flow does not strictly hold anymore, we investigate the distribution of velocity components within porous media of growing complexity, starting from two different periodic arrangements of spheres up to a mixture of log‐normally distributed spheres. We observe that the distribution of velocity components is conditioned by the medium complexity and tends to an exponential pattern. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.