Studies for the development of a virtual permeameter

Abstract

A systematic analysis on the use of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for predicting the permeability of packed beds is presented. A filtration rig is used to obtain permeability measurements of beds of glass beads, sand and crushed minerals. Subsequently, X-ray microtomography is employed to image bed samples for use as input to LBM calculations. Uncertainties in accuracy and reliability of predictions arising from pixel resolution, sample size and digitisation errors in the simulations are evaluated through sensitivity studies and assessments of the representativeness of the bed samples. For beds of spherical and nearspherical particles, any bed sample is capable of providing reproducible and reliable simulation results provided that the particles are adequately resolved within an LBM simulation . For more complex beds of polymorphous, polydisperse particles estimation of the permeability of representative samples of the entire bed is required before average results comparable with data are obtained.

Numerical porosimetry: Evaluation and comparison of yield stress fluids method, mercury intrusion porosimetry and pore network modelling approaches

“…X-ray micro-computed tomography is widely used to characterize the microscopic features of 3D porous media ( Lindquist and Venkatarangan, 20 0 0 ; Burlion et al, 20 06 ;Caulkin et al, 2014 ;Houston et al, 2017 ;Saxena et al, 2018 ). In particular, the digital images acquired with this technique provide input geometries to numerical simulations of fluid flow.…”

“…Recently, Bultreys et al (2016) have comprehensively reviewed the existing imaging techniques for geological porous media as well as the direct simulation and pore Network Modelling approaches for the computation of transport properties. A major advantage of this method, which has been considered by some authors as a "gold standard" ( Arns, 2004 ), is the non-destructive and the non-invasive nature of the tests ( Caulkin et al, 2014 ). Nonetheless, the experimental equipment is costly, and, despite recent progress, spatial resolution ( ∼1 µm) still represents a strong limitation of this method given that the throats of a size smaller than the lowest limit of resolution cannot be measured or are assigned to larger throat sizes.…”