A computationally efficient queue-based algorithm for simulating volume-controlled drainage under the influence of gravity on volumetric images of porous materials

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, gravity-aware, image-based invasion percolation algorithm for simulating fluid invasion in porous materials, achieving significant speedup and high accuracy compared to previous methods and experiments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel priority queue-based image invasion algorithm that efficiently incorporates gravity effects, reducing computational cost and improving simulation accuracy.

Findings

Achieved 20x speedup over previous methods.

Validated against experimental data at multiple Bond numbers.

Successfully incorporated gravity into image-based invasion simulations.

Abstract

Simulating non-wetting fluid invasion in volumetric images of porous materials is of broad interest in applications as diverse as electrochemical devices and CO2 sequestration. Among available methods, image-based algorithms offer much lower computational cost compared to direct numerical simulations. Recent work has extended image-based method to incorporate more physics such as gravity and volume-controlled invasion. The present work combines these two developments to develop an image-based invasion percolation algorithm that incorporates the effect of gravity. Additionally, the presented algorithm was developed using a priority queue algorithm to drastically reduce the computational cost of the simulation. The priority queue-based method was validated against previous image-based methods both with and without the effect of gravity, showing identical results. It was also shown that the new method provides a speedup of 20X over the previous image-based methods. Finally, comparison with experimental results at three Bond numbers showed that the model can predict the real invasion process with a high accuracy with and without gravitational effects.