Evaluation of pressure boundary conditions for permeability calculations using the lattice-Boltzmann method

TL;DR

This paper compares various pressure boundary conditions and LB implementations to optimize accuracy and computational efficiency in permeability calculations of porous media.

Contribution

It provides a systematic evaluation of boundary condition methods and LB data structures for improved permeability estimation accuracy and efficiency.

Findings

Pore-list LB implementation offers better computational efficiency.

Different pressure boundary conditions significantly affect permeability accuracy.

Optimized setup reduces computational effort while maintaining accuracy.

Abstract

Lattice-Boltzmann (LB) simulations are a common tool to numerically estimate the permeability of porous media. For valuable results, the porous structure has to be well resolved resulting in a large computational effort as well as high memory demands. In order to estimate the permeability of realistic samples, it is of importance to not only implement very efficient codes, but also to choose the most appropriate simulation setup to achieve accurate results. With the focus on accuracy and computational effort, we present a comparison between different methods to apply an effective pressure gradient, efficient boundary conditions, as well as two LB implementations based on pore-matrix and pore-list data structures.