Numerical study of fluid flow at pore scale in packed bed of spheres and grains to obtain the REV

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical study to determine the Representative Elemental Volume (REV) size of a porous medium made of packed bed of non-deformable spheres and grains with morphology of Berea sandstone, by means of stochastic packing methods. The Navier–Stokes equations and CFD simulations at the pore level are used to calculate the macroscopic properties of the porous media, such as overall permeability, porosity, and tortuosity. The results obtained show that the values of these parameters present an asymptotic behavior, in the limit values of the REV. This allowed to establish a minimum size of REV, in which it is suggested to carry out the flow analyses to optimize the cost of computational resources without sacrificing the precision of the results.

Keywords

• Permeability
• CFD
• Porous media
• REV
• Numerical simulation