completed in 2010

Multiphase flow simulations coupled to NMR and SIP signatures in reconstructed natural porous media using Lattice Boltzmann methods

Research Area:
Computational Fluid Dynamics, Lattice Boltzmann simulation, Geophysics, HPC

The goal of the project is the development of a numerical tool for the simulation of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and spectral-induced polarization (SIP) responses in partially saturated soils. Such a tool can be used to gain further insight into the interpretation of NMR and SIP signal measurements in field experiments regarding the properties of the involved soils. The tool is based on an existing CFD software for solving multiphase phenomena in porous media, which is based on kinetic methods. The results of imbibition/drainage simulations from that software are used to provide an initial partially saturated state for subsequent NMR/SIP simulations. The software is extended by suitable numerical methods for the simulation of NMR/SIP responses, by measuring NMR responses in both the wetting/non-wetting phase synchronously, by advancing the numerical modeling of the boundaries and by computing magnetic field gradients during the initialization process.

For the numerical representation of the geometry of the porous medium, a voxel set is generated from data of tomographic scans, from which subsequently a Cartesian grid with sub-grid-corrections is derived.

In order to enable members of A1 and A2 to perform self-contained numerical studies, the software prototype is improved in terms of usability, including plausibility checks for input parameters, the user frontend, and the parallelization of the preprocessing steps.

Cooperation partner:
n/a