Tomographic immersed boundary method for permeability prediction of realistic porous media: Simulation and experimental validation

In this paper we demonstrate the ability of a volume-penalizing immersed boundary method to predict pore-scale fluid transport in realistic porous media. A numerical experiment is designed that recreates the exact conditions of a real flow experiment through a fibrous porous medium. Under a constant volumetric flow rate air is forced through the porous sample and the pressure drop across its length is accurately measured. The exact pore geometry is obtained using highresolution micro-computed tomography, and the data is, after processing, directly inserted into the flow solver. Simulations are performed on a uniform Cartesian grid, spanning the entire physical domain (i.e., including both fluid and solid regions)— a feature which represents one of the major benefits of volume penalization. We demonstrate that the numerical results agree well with the experiment and that an error of approximately < 10% is attainable on a grid of 512×256×256 cells.