Quantitative analysis of numerical estimates for the permeability of porous media from lattice-Boltzmann simulations

Ariel Narváez, Thomas Zauner, Frank Raischel, Rudolf Hilfer, Jens Harting

Published 2010-05-14, updated 2010-10-13Version 3

During the last decade, lattice-Boltzmann (LB) simulations have been improved to become an efficient tool for determining the permeability of porous media samples. However, well known improvements of the original algorithm are often not implemented. These include for example multirelaxation time schemes or improved boundary conditions, as well as different possibilities to impose a pressure gradient. This paper shows that a significant difference of the calculated permeabilities can be found unless one uses a carefully selected setup. We present a detailed discussion of possible simulation setups and quantitative studies of the influence of simulation parameters. We illustrate our results by applying the algorithm to a Fontainebleau sandstone and by comparing our benchmark studies to other numerical permeability measurements in the literature.