Techniques for Pore-Scale Simulation in Porous Media

The quality control of pore sizes and pore distributions are critical to its success in providing an alternative for pore-scale simulations. However, care must also be exercised, while checking the mesh quality, as this also controls accuracy in all numerical simulations. There are limitations to the technique and some remedies to overcome these limitations. To produce reliable solutions at the pore-scale, adequate amount of grid points across the pores are required. In low porosity porous media, the void volume occupied by fluid is much less than in the high porosity ones. Hence, with prescribed uniform mesh spacing, this is equivalent to fewer cells and less resolution available for solving the Navier-Stokes equations. To meet this requirement of sufficient resolution, the technique of adaptive meshing has been incorporated in this study to locally refine meshes further in those regions that require it. This technique is robust in accurately predicting transport in porous media, while accounting for pore-scale phenomena.