Computation of effective elastic moduli of rocks using hierarchical homogenization

This work focuses on computing the homogenized elastic properties of rocks from 3D micro -computed-tomography (micro-CT) scanned images. The accurate computation of homogenized properties of rocks, archetypal random media, requires both resolution of intricate underlying microstructure and large field of view, resulting in huge micro-CT images. Homogenization entails solving the local elasticity problem computationally which can be prohibitively expensive for a huge image. To mitigate this problem, we use a renormalization method inspired scheme, the hierarchical homogenization method, where a large image is partitioned into smaller subimages. The individual subimages are separately homogenized using periodic boundary conditions, and then assembled into a much smaller intermediate image. The intermediate image is again homogenized, subject to the periodic boundary condition, to find the final homogenized elastic constant of the original image. An FFT-based elasticity solver is used to solve the associated periodic elasticity problem. The error in the homogenized elastic constant is empirically shown to follow a power law scaling with exponent -1 with respect to the subimage size across all five microstructures of rocks. We further show that the inclusion of surrounding materials during the homogenization of the small subimages reduces error in the final homogenized elastic moduli while still respecting the power law with the exponent of -1. This power law scaling is then exploited to determine a better approximation of the large heterogeneous microstructures based on Richardson extrapolation.

Automated summary

This study focuses on calculating the homogenized elastic properties of rocks using 3D micro-CT scanned images. To solve the problem of large micro-CT images, a hierarchical homogenization method is proposed, where the image is divided into smaller subimages. The subimages are individually homogenized and then assembled to find the final homogenized elastic constant. The error in the homogenized constant follows a power law scaling with respect to the subimage size, and this scaling is used for better approximation of large heterogeneous microstructures.