Investigation of Post-Darcy Flow in Thin Porous Media

Abstract

We present numerical simulations of post-Darcy flow in thin porous medium: one consisting of staggered arrangements of circular cylinders and one random distribution of cylinders bounded between walls. The simulations span a range of Reynolds numbers, 40 to 4000, where the pressure drop varies nonlinearly with the average velocity, covering nonlinear laminar flow to the fully turbulent regime. The results are compared to those obtained by replacing the bounding walls with symmetric boundaries with the aim to reveal the effect of bounding walls on microscopic characteristics and macroscopic measures, i.e., pressure drop, hydrodynamic dispersion and Reynolds stresses. We use large eddy simulation to directly calculate the Reynolds stresses and turbulent intensity. The simulations show that vortical structures emerge at the boundary between the cylinders and the bounding walls causing a difference between the microscopic flow in the confined and non-confined porous media. This affects the averaged values of pressure drop, the hydrodynamic dispersion and the Reynolds stresses. Finally, the distance between the bounding walls is altered with the particle Reynolds number kept constant. It is observed that the difference between results calculated in confined and non-confined cases increases when the bounding walls are narrower.