Pore-scale lattice Boltzmann simulation of laminar and turbulent flow through a sphere pack

The lattice Boltzmann method can be used to simulate flow through porous media with full geometrical resolution. With such a direct numerical simulation, it becomes possible to study fundamental effects which are difficult to assess either by developing macroscopic mathematical models or experiments. We first evaluate the lattice Boltzmann method with various boundary handling of the solid-wall and various collision operators to assess their suitability for large scale direct numerical simulation of porous media flow. A periodic pressure drop boundary condition is used to mimic the pressure driven flow through the simple sphere pack in a periodic domain. The evaluation of the method is done in the Darcy regime and the results are compared to a semi-analytic solution. Taking into account computational cost and accuracy, we choose the most efficient combination of the solid boundary condition and collision operator. We apply this method to perform simulations for a wide range of Reynolds numbers from Stokes flow over seven orders of magnitude to turbulent flow. Contours and streamlines of the flow field are presented to show the flow behavior in different flow regimes. Moreover, unknown parameters of the Forchheimer, the Barree–Conway and friction factor models are evaluated numerically for the considered flow regimes.