Pore-scale simulation of salt fingers in porous media using a coupled iterative source-correction immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann solver

Abstract

In the conventional representative elementary volume-scale models, details of fluid movement, thermal transfer and mass transport in the porous media are relatively hard to capture, while the understanding of them is crucial in many diverse engineering and environmental applications such as running nuclear power facilities or pollutant diffusion in soil environment. In this paper, a pore-scale lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) modeling of double diffusion systems in saturated porous media is developed to investigate the role played by pore structure in the behavior of salt finger phenomena together with their fluid flow mechanism. An iterative source-correction immersed boundary method is developed to describe the solid skeleton with different boundary conditions for velocity field, heat transfer, and mass transport, respectively. The natural convection in a vertical annulus and the conjugate heat transfer problem in a two-layer horizontal annulus are employed to verify the accuracy and the applicability of the immersed boundary method for Dirichlet-type, Neumann-type and conjugate heat transfer boundary conditions, respectively. Comparisons between the present results and existing investigation show a very good agreement and demonstrate that the double diffusive process in porous media can be predicted with a good accuracy by the proposed model. Subsequently, the instability evolution process of salt finger-type of double diffusive convection in porous media is investigated, with a focus on the structure and behavior of salt fingers and the kinetic energy evolution. The obtained simulation results show that in saturated porous media, relatively large vertical mass fluxes can be generated even if the density distribution is of dynamical stability.