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Pore scale study of flow in porous media: Scale dependency, REV, and statistical REV
Author(s) -
Zhang Dongxiao,
Zhang Raoyang,
Chen Shiyi,
Soll Wendy E.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/1999gl011101
Subject(s) - porous medium , lattice boltzmann methods , scale (ratio) , dependency (uml) , porosity , permeability (electromagnetism) , statistical physics , flow (mathematics) , geology , representative elementary volume , materials science , mechanics , physics , geotechnical engineering , thermodynamics , computer science , chemistry , biochemistry , software engineering , quantum mechanics , finite element method , membrane
Flow in porous media is studied at the pore‐scale with lattice Boltzmann simulations on pore geometries reconstructed from computed microtomographic images. Pore scale results are analyzed to give quantities such as permeability, porosity and specific surface area at various scales and at various locations. With this, some fundamental issues such as scale dependency and medium variability can be assessed quantitatively. More specifically, the existence and size of the well known concept, representative elementary volume (REV), can be quantified. It is found that the size of an REV varies spatially and depends on the quantity being represented. For heterogeneous media, a better measure may be the so called “statistical REV”, which has weaker requirements than does the deterministic REV.