Title
Finite-difference method Stokes solver (FDMSS) for 3D pore geometries: Software development, validation and case studies.
Abstract
Permeability is one of the fundamental properties of porous media and is required for large-scale Darcian fluid flow and mass transport models. Whilst permeability can be measured directly at a range of scales, there are increasing opportunities to evaluate permeability from pore-scale fluid flow simulations. We introduce the free software Finite-Difference Method Stokes Solver (FDMSS) that solves Stokes equation using a finite-difference method (FDM) directly on voxelized 3D pore geometries (i.e. without meshing). Based on explicit convergence studies, validation on sphere packings with analytically known permeabilities, and comparison against lattice-Boltzmann and other published FDM studies, we conclude that FDMSS provides a computationally efficient and accurate basis for single-phase pore-scale flow simulations. By implementing an efficient parallelization and code optimization scheme, permeability inferences can now be made from 3D images of up to 109 voxels using modern desktop computers. Case studies demonstrate the broad applicability of the FDMSS software for both natural and artificial porous media.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1016/j.cageo.2018.01.005
Computers & Geosciences
Keywords
Field
DocType
Pore-scale modelling,Stokes flow solver,X-ray micro-tomography (XMT),Velocity field,Pressure field,REV analysis
Convergence (routing),Data mining,Computer science,Vector field,Software,Computational science,Fluid dynamics,Finite difference method,Solver,Porous medium,Stokes flow
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
114
C
0098-3004
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
7
Authors
9