We perform a numerical study of the heat transfer and flow structure of Rayleigh-Bénard (RB) convection in (in most cases regular) porous media, which are comprised of circular, solid obstacles located on a square lattice. This study is focused on the role of porosity $ϕ$ in the flow properties during the transition process from the traditional RB convection with $ϕ=1$ (so no obstacles included) to Darcy-type porous-media convection with $ϕ$ approaching 0. Simulations are carried out in a cell with unity aspect ratio, for the Rayleigh number $Ra$ from $10^5$ to $10^{10}$ and varying porosities $ϕ$, at a fixed Prandtl number $Pr=4.3$, and we restrict ourselves to the two dimensional case. For fixed $Ra$, the Nusselt number $Nu$ is found to vary non-monotonously as a function of $ϕ$; namely, with decreasing $ϕ$, it first increases, before it decreases for $ϕ$ approaching 0. The non-monotonous behaviour of $Nu(ϕ)$ originates from two competing effects of the porous structure on the heat transfer. On the one hand, the flow coherence is enhanced in the porous media, which is beneficial for the heat transfer. On the other hand, the convection is slowed down by the enhanced resistance due to the porous structure, leading to heat transfer reduction. For fixed $ϕ$, depending on $Ra$, two different heat transfer regimes are identified, with different effective power-law behaviours of $Nu$ vs $Ra$, namely, a steep one for low $Ra$ when viscosity dominates, and the standard classical one for large $Ra$. The scaling crossover occurs when the thermal boundary layer thickness and the pore scale are comparable. The influences of the porous structure on the temperature and velocity fluctuations, convective heat flux, and energy dissipation rates are analysed, further demonstrating the competing effects of the porous structure to enhance or reduce the heat transfer.
Porous materials are used in many fields, including energy industry, agriculture, medical industry, etc. The generation of digital porous media facilitates the fabrication of real porous media and the analysis of their properties. The past random digital porous media generation methods are unable to generate a porous medium with a specific permeability. A new method is proposed in the present study, which can generate the random packed isotropic porous media with specific porosity and permeability. Firstly, the process of generating the random packed isotropic porous media is detailed. Secondl…
In the above paper the author treats the boundary layer flow along a vertical flat plate, immersed in a Darcy Brinkman Forchheimer porous medium. The porosity and the permeability of the porous medium are variable across the boundary layer. In addition a magnetic field with constant strength is applied normal to the plate. The fluid temperature at the plate is constant and different from that of the ambient fluid. This temperature difference creates a buoyancy force and the flow is characterized as mixed convection. The partial differential equations of the boundary layer flow are transformed …
In this article we investigate the permeability of a porous medium as given in Darcy's law. The permeability is described by an effective hydraulic pore radius in the porous medium, the fluctuation in local hydraulic pore radii, the length of streamlines, and the fractional volume conducting flow. The effective hydraulic pore radius is related to a characteristic hydraulic length, the fluctuation in local hydraulic radii is related to a constriction factor, the length of streamlines is characterized by a tortuosity, and the fractional volume conducting flow from inlet to outlet is described by…
This study refutes the premise that the distribution of flow speeds in complex porous media can be described by a simple function such as a normal or exponential variation. In many complex porous media, including those relevant for subsurface storage and recovery applications, a separation of scales exists between larger inter-granular pores and micro-porosity inside the grains, leading to different flow signatures that need to be described by multimodal functions with distinct flow field characteristics. We demonstrate this finding by devising a novel methodology to simulate fluid flow in car…
The interaction between the flow above and below a permeable wall is a central topic in the study of porous media. While previous investigations have provided compelling evidence of the strong coupling between the two regions, few studies have quantitatively measured the directionality, i.e., causal-and-effect relations, of this interaction. To shed light on the problem, we use transfer entropy as a marker to evaluate the causal interaction between the free turbulent flow and the porous media using interface-resolved direct numerical simulation. Our results show that the porosity of the porous…
The permeability of a porous medium is strongly affected by its local geometry and connectivity, the size distribution of the solid inclusions and the pores available for flow. Since direct measurements of the permeability are time consuming and require experiments that are not always possible, the reliable theoretical assessment of the permeability based on the medium structural characteristics alone is of importance. When the porosity approaches unity, the permeability-porosity relationships represented by the Kozeny-Carman equations and Archie's law predict that permeability tends to infini…
This Note determines the unsteady non-circulatory forces on an arbitrarily deforming panel with a Holder-continuous porosity distribution. An analytical expression for the non-circulatory pressure distribution is presented and evaluated for the special cases of uniform and variable-porosity panels undergoing harmonic deformations, where special attention is paid to the influence of the panel end conditions. These results constitute the first major step towards a complete linearized, unsteady aerodynamic theory for lifting porous bodies, which may have potential application to the performance e…
We study numerically the tortuosity--porosity relation in a microscopic model of a porous medium arranged as a collectin of freely overlapping squares. It is demonstrated that the finite-size effects and the discretization errors, which were ignored in previous studies, may cause significant underestimation of tortuosity. The simple tortuosity calculation method proposed here eliminates the need for using complicated, weighted averages. The numerical results presented here are in good agreement with an empirical relation between tortuosity ($T$) and porosity ($ϕ$) given by $T-1\propto \lnϕ$, t…
Velocity distribution functions link the micro- and macro-level theories of fluid flow through porous media. Here we study them for the fluid absolute velocity and its longitudinal and lateral components relative to the macroscopic flow direction in a model of a random porous medium. We claim that all distributions follow the power exponential law controlled by an exponent $γ$ and a shift parameter $u_0$ and examine how these parameters depend on the porosity. We find that $γ$ has a universal value $1/2$ at the percolation threshold and grows with the porosity, but never exceeds 2.
A sensitive porosity adjoint method (SPAM) for optimizing the topology of fluid machines has been proposed. A sensitivity function with respect to the porosity has been developed. In the first step of the optimization process, porous media are introduced into the flow regime according to the sensitivity function. Then the optimized porous media are transformed to solid walls. The turbulent flow in porous media is accounted for by a modified eddy-viscosity based turbulence model. Its influence on the adjoint equations is nevertheless neglected, which refers to the so called frozen turbulence as…
The prediction of pressure and flow distributions inside porous membranes is important if the geometry deviates from single-bore tubular geometries. This task remains challenging, especially when considering local porosity variations caused by lumen- and shell-side membrane skins and macro- and micro-void structures, all of them present in multibore membranes. This study analyzes pure water forward and reverse permeation and backwashing phenomena for a polymeric multibore membrane with spatially-varying porosity and permeability properties using computational fluid dynamics simulations. The he…
Present work attempts to identify the roles of flow- and geometric-variables on the scaling factor which is a necessary parameter for modeling the apparent viscosity of non-Newtonian fluid in porous media. While idealizing the porous media microstructure as arrays of circular and square cylinders, present study uses multi-relaxation time lattice Boltzmann method to conduct pore-scale simulation of shear thinning non-Newtonian fluid flow. Variation in the size and inclusion ratio of the solid cylinders generates wide range of porous media with varying porosity and permeability. Present study al…
A reactive fluid dissolving the surrounding rock matrix can trigger an instability in the dissolution front, leading to spontaneous formation of pronounced channels or wormholes. Theoretical investigations of this instability have typically focused on a steadily propagating dissolution front that separates regions of high and low porosity. In this paper we show that this is not the only possible dissolutional instability in porous rocks; there is another instability that operates instantaneously on any initial porosity field, including an entirely uniform one. The relative importance of the tw…
This paper reports turbulent boundary layer measurements made over open-cell reticulated foams with varying pore size and thickness, but constant porosity ($ε\approx 0.97$). The foams were flush-mounted into a cutout on a flat plate. A Laser Doppler Velocimeter (LDV) was used to measure mean streamwise velocity and turbulence intensity immediately upstream of the porous section, and at multiple measurement stations along the porous substrate. The friction Reynolds number upstream of the porous section was $Re_τ\approx 1690$. For all but the thickest foam tested, the internal boundary layer was…
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are utilized to encode the relation between initial configurations of obstacles and three fundamental quantities in porous media: porosity ($φ$), permeability $k$, and tortuosity ($T$). The two-dimensional systems with obstacles are considered. The fluid flow through a porous medium is simulated with the lattice Boltzmann method. It is demonstrated that the CNNs are able to predict the porosity, permeability, and tortuosity with good accuracy. With the usage of the CNN models, the relation between $T$ and $φ$ has been reproduced and compared with the empiric…
We investigate the upscaling of diffusive transport parameters as function of pore scale material structure using a stochastic framework. We focus on sub-REV (representative elementary volume) scale where the complexity of pore space geometry leads to a significant scatter of transport observations. We study a large data set of sub-REV measurements on porosity and transport ability being a dimensionless parameter representing the ratio of diffusive flow through the porous volume and through an empty volume. We characterize transport ability as probability distribution functions (PDFs) of poros…
A major challenge in flow through porous media is to better understand the link between microstructure and macroscale flow and transport. For idealised microstructures, the mathematical framework of homogenisation theory can be used for this purpose. Here, we consider a two-dimensional microstructure comprising an array of obstacles of smooth but arbitrary shape, the size and spacing of which can vary along the length of the porous medium. We use homogenisation via the method of multiple scales to systematically upscale a novel problem involving cells of varying area to obtain effective contin…
The modeling of flow and heat transfer in porous media systems have always been a challenge and, the extended Darcy transport models for flow and equilibrium and non-equilibrium energy models for heat transfer are being used for macro-level analysis, however, the limitations of these models are subjected to porous geometry. The forced convective flow of an incompressible viscous fluid through a channel filled with four different types of porous geometries constructed using the Triply-Periodic-Minimal-Surface (or TPMS) model, are presented in this study. Four TPMS lattice shapes namely; Diamond…
We study the distributions of channel openings, local fluxes, and velocities in a two-dimensional random medium of non-overlapping disks. We present theoretical arguments supported by numerical data of high precision and find scaling laws as function of the porosity. For the channel openings we observe a crossover to a highly correlated regime at small porosities. The distribution of velocities through these channels scales with the square of the porosity. The fluxes turn out to be the convolution of velocity and channel width corrected by a geometrical factor. Furthermore, while the distribut…
The objective of this study is to highlight the effect of porosity variation in a topology optimization process in the field of fluid dynamics. Usually a penalization term added to momentum equation provides to get material distribution. Every time material is added inside the computational domain, there is creation of new fluid-solid interfaces and apparition of gradient of porosity. However, at present, porosity variation is not taken account in topology optimization and the penalization term used to locate the solid is analogous to a Darcy term used for flows in porous media. With that in m…
The paper deals with the global Kondaurov double porosity model describing a non-equilibrium two-phase immiscible flow in fractured-porous reservoirs when non-equilibrium phenomena occur in the matrix blocks, only. It is shown that the homogenized model can be represented as usual equations of two-phase incompressible immiscible flow, except for the addition of two source terms calculated by a solution to a local problem which is a boundary value problem for a non-equilibrium imbibition equation given in terms of the real saturation and a non-equilibrium parameter.
We extend unsteady thin aerofoil theory to model aerofoils with generalised chordwise porosity distributions. The analysis considers a linearised porosity boundary condition where the seepage velocity through the aerofoil is related to the local pressure jump across the aerofoil surface and to the unsteady characteristics of the porous medium. Application of the Plemelj formulae to the resulting boundary value problem yields a singular Fredholm--Volterra integral equation which does not admit an analytic solution. Accordingly, we develop a numerical solution scheme by expanding the bound vorti…
Natural convection in porous media is a fundamental process for the long-term storage of CO2 in deep saline aquifers. Typically, details of mass transfer in porous media are inferred from the numerical solution of the volume-averaged Darcy-Oberbeck-Boussinesq (DOB) equations, even though these equations do not account for the microscopic properties of a porous medium. According to the DOB equations, natural convection in a porous medium is uniquely determined by the Rayleigh number. However, in contrast with experiments, DOB simulations yield a linear scaling of the Sherwood number with the Ra…
Sub-resolution porosity (SRP) is an ubiquitous, yet often ignored, feature in Digital Rock Physics. It embodies the trade-off between image resolution and field-of-view, and it is a direct result of choosing an imaging resolution that is larger than the smallest pores in a heterogeneous rock sample. In this study, we investigate the impacts of SRP on multiphase flow in porous rocks. To do so, we use our newly developed Multiphase Micro-Continuum model to perform first-of-a-kind direct numerical simulations of two-phase flow in porous samples containing SRP. We show that SRP properties (porosit…
Darcy's law for porous media transport is given a new local thermodynamic basis in terms of the grand potential of confined fluids. The local effective pressure gradient is determined using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics, and the hydraulic conductivity and permeability are investigated. The transport coefficients are determined for single-phase flow in face-centered cubic lattices of solid spheres. The porosity changed from that in the closest packing of spheres to near unity in a pure fluid, while the fluid mass density varied from that of a dilute gas to a dense liquid. The permeability …
We propose a theory for erosional channelization induced by fluid flow in a saturated granular porous medium. When the local fluid flow-induced stress is larger than a critical threshold, grains are dislodged and carried away so that the porosity of the medium is altered by erosion. This in turn affects the local hydraulic conductivity and pressure in the medium and results in the growth and development of channels that preferentially conduct the flow. Our multiphase model involves a dynamical porosity field that evolves along with the volume fraction of the mobile and immobile grains in respo…
The current conceptual model of mineral dissolution in porous media is comprised of three dissolution patterns (wormhole, compact, and uniform) - or regimes - that develop depending on the relative dominance of flow, diffusion, and reaction rate. Here, we examine the evolution of pore structure during acid injection using numerical simulations on two porous media structures of increasing complexity. We examine the boundaries between regimes and characterise the existence of a fourth regime called channeling, where already existing fast flow pathways are preferentially widened by dissolution. C…
Transport of viscous fluid through porous media is a direct consequence of the pore structure. Here we investigate transport through a specific class of two-dimensional porous geometries, namely those formed by fluid-mechanical erosion. We investigate the tortuosity and dispersion by analyzing the first two statistical moments of tracer trajectories. For most initial configurations, tortuosity decreases in time as a result of erosion increasing the porosity. However, we find that tortuosity can also increase transiently in certain cases. The porosity-tortuosity relationships that result from o…
The paper deals with a theoretical study of the transport of a fluid in a channel, which takes place by the phenomenon of peristalsis. A mathematical analysis of the said problem has been presented. The analysis involves the application of a suitable perturbation technique. The velocity profile and the critical pressure for the occurrence of reflux are investigated with particular emphasis by using appropriate numerical methods. The effects of various parameters, such as Reynolds number, pressure gradient, porosity parameter, Darcy number, slip parameter, amplitude ratio and wave number on vel…
A pore-scale numerical model for reactive transport processes based on the Lattice Boltzmann method is used to study the dissolution-induced changes in hydrologic properties of a fractured medium and a porous medium. The solid phase of both media consists of two minerals, and a structure reconstruction method called quartet structure generation set is employed to generate the distributions of both minerals. Emphasis is put on the effects of undissolved minerals on the changes of permeability and porosity under different Peclet and Damkohler numbers. The simulation results show porous layers fo…
