Simulation of Drainage in a Porous Medium

CFD simulation of the displacement of (transparent) water by air, which is injected through the bottom of the sand sample

Benjamin Ahrenholz
Manfred Krafczyk
Institute of Computational Modeling in Civil Engineering (iRMB)
Technische Universität Braunschweig
Braunschweig, Germany

CFD simulations of multiphase flow in porous media are a valuable contribution in order to understand e.g. the transport of pollutants, how ink infiltrates paper, or oil can be recovered from petroleum deposits. However, the performing of efficient simulations in complex geometries at a large scale requires massively parallel computations. Here, the results of drainage and imbibition (with Degrees of Freedom larger than 2.0e+11) in natural porous media gained from microtomography methods are presented. Those fully resolved pore scale simulations are essential for a better understanding of the physical processes in porous media and therefore important for the derivation of upscaling laws.

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