Pore Scale Study of Flow in Some Three Dimensional Porous Media Using Lattice Boltzmann Method

The Lattice Boltzmann method is employed for pore-level fluid flow simulation in 3D porous media. The base of study of a fibrous porous medium is an ordered arrangement of cylinders which is not investigated by LBM so far. LBM is well suited to the study of mesoscopic pore-level flow in porous media. Permeability, k, is the most important property which characterizes a porous medium. It is a measureof the frictional resistance of the material to flow. In the present paper, Lattice Boltzmann method is presented asa powerful tool in order to calculate some appropriate values of permeability in some porous media. A good representation ofthe pore structure can be in the form of ordered arrangements of sphere or cylinder obstacles. Regular array of sphere and, for the first time, cylinder packs domains were virtually reconstructed and input to a LBM algorithm based on a D3Q15 lattice. Then a pressure gradient was applied to induce fluid flow to the lattice, the Darcy velocity was calculated and applying Darcy’s law, the permeability was predicted. Effects of geometrical parameters like porosity or lattice resolution on permeability were investigated. Finally, the results were validated against available analytical, experimental, and numerical data from literature.