Simulation of weak‐inertia single‐phase flow in porous materials using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Abstract

Intrinsic permeability of a porous material is a crucial material parameter in various application fields like e.g. geosciences, materials science, biological sciences and mechanical engineering. In contrast to the permeability often used in purely linear models, however, it is also a (nonlinear) function of the Reynolds number (Re) with the onset of the influence of inertial forces. In coarse-grained continuum models the Forchheimer equation describes this incipient influence of viscous momentum exchange but it is based on the adaptation of experimentally obtained data and its range of validity remains a subject for discussion. Performing three-dimensional Direct Numerical Simulations for single-phase flow through porous media this work aims to show a smooth transition of effective intrinsic permeability within the interval 0.1 < Re < 1000. We use the fully-Lagrangian meshless Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method (SPH) to solve the weakly compressible Navier-Stokes equations for pore-scale resolved flow in the so-called weak-inertia regime. Our implementation utilizes HOOMD-blue thus allows us to perform massively parallel computations which are crucial for these applications.

Establishment and prediction of liquid permeability model for metal porous materials

“…Due to the porous nature of porous materials, pressure fluids with a certain velocity can penetrate porous materials, and the ability of this fluid to penetrate porous materials is called permeability. The permeability of porous materials is mainly affected by two aspects: one is the distribution of the pore structure of the porous material itself, and the other is the characteristics of the fluid itself, such as viscosity [2] . The types of fluids flowing through porous materials can be classified into two categories: gas and liquid.…”