Inertial flow in porous media: A numerical investigation on model structures

Abstract

The aim of this work is to study the correction to Darcy's law for inertial flow in porous media. In many situations encountered in industrial applications such as flow in column reactors, gas flow near wells for hydrocarbon recovery and CO2 sequestration, flow in filters... , Reynolds numbers are large enough to lead to a non-linear relationship between the filtration velocity and the pressure gradient. In this work, a numerical analysis of the non linear -inertial- correction to Darcy's law is carried out for the stationary inertial flow of a one-phase Newtonian incompressible fluid on model 2D and 3D structures. Effective properties appearing in the macroscopic model resulting from the volume averaging of the mass and momentum (Navier-Stokes) equations at the pore scale are determined using the microscopic flow fields and solving the closure problems resulting from up-scaling. From the numerical simulations, the dependence of the correction to Darcy's law on the geometrical properties of the 3D structure is studied. These properties are the shape of the solid grains which may be cubic or spherical and the degree of disorder in their arrangement in the domain. Weak disorder corresponds to a random placement of the grains of identical shape and size within each cell of a regular 3D lattice, while for strong disorder, grain size is also randomly distributed.