Comparing methods for permeability computation of porous materials and their limitations

Abstract

Efficient numerical simulations of fluid flow on the pore scale allow for the numerical estimation of effective material properties of porous media, e.g. intrinsic permeability or tortuosity. These parameters are essential for various applications where hydro‐mechanical properties on larger scales have to be known. Numerical tools based intrinsically on pore scale simulations are known e.g. as Digital Rock Physics in geosciences and have even more and more replaced physical experiments. For these reasons, the validation of numerical methods as well as the establishment of clear limits regarding the application areas play an important role. Here, we compute single‐phase flow through a porous matrix, e.g. irregular sphere packings, sandstones, artificially created thin porous media, on the pore scale. Therefore we implement on the one hand a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics algorithm for solving the Navier‐Stokes equations and on the other hand a Finite Difference solver for the Stokes equations. Both methods work directly and seamlessly on voxel data of porous materials which are generated by µXRCT‐scans or by microfluidic experiments that have undergone segmentation and binarization. We compare both solvers from a parallel performance point of view as well as their results for flows in the Darcy regime. In addition, we investigate the limitations of the solvers using the example of a porous material whose pore geometry changes over time and precipitation affects the flow conditions.