Fluid dynamics in porous media with Sailfish

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how Sailfish, an open-source lattice-Boltzmann software, can simulate fluid flow in artificial porous media to analyze properties like permeability, tortuosity, and validate the Kozeny--Carman equation.

Contribution

It applies Sailfish to model fluid dynamics in porous media, providing a computational approach for permeability and tortuosity analysis, and evaluates the Kozeny--Carman equation's validity.

Findings

Sailfish effectively simulates fluid flow in porous samples.

Calculated permeability and tortuosity for various porosities.

Validated the Kozeny--Carman equation with our samples.

Abstract

In this work we show the application of Sailfish to the study of fluid dynamics in porous media. Sailfish is an open-source software based on the lattice-Boltzmann method. This application of computational fluid dynamics is of particular interest to the oil and gas industry and the subject could be a starting point for an undergraduate or graduate student in physics or engineering. We built artificial samples of porous media with different porosities and used Sailfish to simulate the fluid flow through in order to calculate permeability and tortuosity. We also present a simple way to obtain the specific superficial area of porous media using Python libraries. To contextualize these concepts, we test the Kozeny--Carman equation, discuss its validity and calculate the Kozeny's constant for our artificial samples.