A new upscaling method for microscopic fluid flow based on digital rocks

This report presents our new findings in microscopic fluid flow based on digital rocks. Permeability of digital rocks can be estimated by pore-scale simulations using the Stokes equation, but the computational cost can be extremely high due to the complicated pore geometry and the large number of voxels. In this study, a novel method is proposed to simplify the three-dimensional pore-scale simulation to multiple decoupled two-dimensional ones, and each two-dimensional simulation provides the velocity distribution over a slice. By this decoupled simulation approach, the expensive simulation based on the Stokes equation is conducted only on two-dimensional domains, and the final three-dimensional simulation of Darcy equation using the finite difference method is very cheap. The proposed method is validated by both sandstone and carbonate rock samples and shows significant enhancement in the computational speed. This work sheds light on large-scale microscopic fluid flow based on digital rocks.

Automated summary

This study presents a new method to simplify the three-dimensional pore-scale simulation based on digital rocks, resulting in significant improvement in computational speed. By decoupling the simulation into multiple two-dimensional ones and then using the finite difference method for the three-dimensional simulation, computational costs are reduced while accurate results are obtained. Validations using sandstone and carbonate rock samples show significant enhancement in computational speed.