User Project Details

SPHPore

Particle-Based Simulation of Flow in Porous Media

Computational Fluid Dynamics

Universität Stuttgart

Institut für Mechanik (Bauwesen)

Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of fluid flow through porous media are of utmost importance in in various fields like mechanical engineering, materials science, or geosciences, among others. For our applications, we implement a quasi-incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method. This is an Lagrangian meshless method, which is suitable for the complex geometries of porous materials' microstructure and simplifies modeling of flow at large Reynolds numbers. However, SPH requires high computational resources due to the nature of collocation derived methods. The focus of the present study is to compute the hydraulic permeability and the tortuosity in the weak inertia regime and thus to determine a function describing their dependency on the Reynolds number. Therefor, we perform high resolution 3-dimensional simulations of two Representative Volume Elements (RVEs) of typical reservoir rocks with different porosities. Additionally, we compare results for two spatial resolutions.