Simulation of Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in Porous Medium Using Lattice Boltzmann Method

Abstract

Fluid flow and heat transfer in porous medium are an interesting phenomena to study. One kind example of porous medium is geothermal reservoir. By understanding the fluid flow and heat transfer in porous medium, it help us to understand the phenomena in geothermal reservoir, such as thermal change because of injection process. Thermal change in the reservoir is the most important physical property to known since it has correlation with performance of the reservoir, such as the electrical energy produced by reservoir. In this simulation, we investigate the fluid flow and heat transfer in geothermal reservoir as a simple flow in porous medium canal using Lattice Boltzmann Method. In this simulation, we worked on 2 dimension with nine vectors velocity (D2Q9). To understand the fluid flow and heat transfer in reservoir, we varied the fluid temperature that inject into the reservoir and set the heat source constant at 410°C. The first variation we set the fluid temperature 45°C, second 102.5°C, and the last 307.5°C. Furthermore, we also set the parameter of reservoir such as porosity, density, and injected fluid velocity are constant. Our results show that for the first temperature variation distribution between experiment and simulation is 92.86% match. From second variation shows that there is one pick of thermal distribution and one of turbulence zone, and from the last variation show that there are two pick of thermal distribution and two of turbulence zone.