A sharp-interface treatment technique for two-phase flows in meshless methods

In this paper, a new interface treatment technique for multi-phase meshless methods is proposed for two-dimensional simulations. It enables the interface conditions to be applied effectively on the interface points involving interface tension and high viscosity. This technique is incorporated in the Meshless Local Petrov–Galerkin method with the Rankine source solution (MLPG_R) and the model predictions are validated through a number of standard test cases. Convergent results that agreed well with both available analytical and numerical solutions from other methods are obtained in simulations of square-droplet deformation, capillary wave, bubble rising and Rayleigh–Taylor instability. In these cases, sharp pressure discontinuity at the interface is well predicted with depressed parasitic current and the capability of the technique in dealing with high viscosity is comprehensively demonstrated

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulations for Dynamic Capillary Interactions

Complex interactions in porous media play an important role on many industrial and geotechnical applications, such as groundwater treatment, porous catalysts, carbon geosequestration, and oil recovery. Rate-dependent wetting effects are of great significance in understanding the multiphase behaviours of porous media thus further throw light on engineering solutions to the above problems. In this thesis, a modified smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model is applied to simulate (1) the contact angle dynamics and (2) stretching of liquid bridge at meso-scale. This SPH model adopted an inter-particle force formulation with short-range repulsive force and long-range attractive force to take into account single-phase and multiphase interactions. Particularly, a newly-introduced viscous force is imposed at the liquid-solid interface to capture the rate-dependent behaviours of contact angle without prescribing additional arbitrary condition or force. After identification of model parameters, the rate-dependent contact angle behaviours are studied for both wetting and dewetting phenomena. By analysing the contact angle results of fluid at triple-line region with different moving speeds, the dynamic contact angles and corresponding capillary numbers can be correlated by power law functions. The derived correlation and constants are compared with different forms of empirical power law functions and the results are satisfactory. Moreover, we investigated the properties of stretching liquid bridges, including shape evolution, liquid transfer ratio and flow condition under dynamic loading. Different stretching rates are applied, and the shapes of liquid bridge at same breakup distance is presented. By differentiating the wettability of top and bottom substrates, the liquid transfer ratio regarding wettability difference and substrate moving speed is studied

Boundary condition enforcement for renormalised weakly compressible meshless Lagrangian methods

This paper introduces a boundary condition scheme for weakly compressible (WC) renormalised first-order accurate meshless Lagrangian methods (MLM) by considering both solid and free surface conditions. A hybrid meshless Lagrangian method-finite difference (MLM-FD) scheme on prescribed boundary nodes is proposed to enforce Neumann boundary conditions. This is used to enforce symmetry boundary conditions and the implied Neumann pressure boundary conditions on solid boundaries in a manner consistent with the Navier-Stokes equation leading to the accurate recovery of surface pressures. The free surface boundary conditions allow all differential operators to be approximated by the same renormalised scheme while also efficiently determining free surface particles. The boundary conditions schemes are implemented for two renormalised MLMs. A WC smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) solver is compared to a WC generalised finite difference (GFD) solver. Applications in both 2D and 3D are explored. A substantial performance benefit was found when comparing the WCGFD solver to the WCSPH solver with the WCGFD solver realising a maximum speedup in the range of three times over WCSPH in both 2D and 3D configurations. The solvers were implemented in C++ and used the NVIDIA CUDA 10.1 toolkit for the parallelisation of the solvers.http://www.elsevier.com/locate/enganaboundhj2022Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineerin

Two-phase flow in rocks : new insights from multi-scale pore network modeling and fast pore scale visualization

Many geological applications involve the flow of multiple fluids through porous geological materials, e.g. environmental remediation of polluted ground water resources, carbon dioxide storage in geological reservoirs and petroleum recovery. Commonly, to model these applications, the geological materials in question are treated as continuous porous media with effective material properties. Since these properties are a manifestation of what goes on in the pores of the material, we have to study the transport processes at the pore scale to understand why and how they vary over space and time in different rocks and under different conditions. As the high cost of acquiring and testing samples in many of these applications is often a limiting factor, numerical modelling at the pore scale is becoming a key technology to gain new insights in this field. This could be crucial in reducing uncertainties in field scale projects. The work presented in this thesis focuses on the investigation of two-phase flow in sedimentary rocks, and is an integrated numerical and experimental study. It deals primarily with two outstanding issues. First, image-based pore scale simulation methods have difficulties with representing the multiple pore scales in rocks with wide pore size distributions, due to a trade-off in the size and resolution of both modeling and imaging methods. Therefore, performing two-phase flow simulations in a number of important rock types, such as many carbonates and tight, clay-baring sandstones has remained an outstanding challenge. To tackle this problem, a new numerical model was developed to calculate capillary pressure, relative permeability and resistivity index curves during drainage and imbibition processes in such materials. The multi-scale model was based on information obtained from 3D micro-computed tomography images of the internal pore structure, complemented with information on the pores that are unresolved with this technique. In this method, pore network models were first extracted from resolved pores in the images, by using a maximal ball network extraction algorithm. Then, pores which touched regions with unresolved porosity were connected with a special type of network element called micro-links. In the quasi-static simulations that were performed on these network models, the micro-links carried average properties of the unresolved porosity. In contrast to most previous models, the new approach to taking into account unresolved porosity therefore allowed efficient simulations on images of complex rocks, with sizes comparable to single-scale pore network models. It was able to reproduce most of the behaviour of a fully resolved pore network model, for both drainage and imbibition processes, and for different pore scale wettability distributions (water-wet, oil-wet and different mixed-wet distributions). Furthermore, simulations on images of carbonate rocks showed good agreement to experiments. A sensitivity study on carbonate rocks and tight, clay-bearing sandstones produced results that were in qualitative agreement with experiments, and allowed to analyse how the two-phase flow behaviour of these rocks is influenced by their pore scale properties. The second issue which is treated in this thesis is related to the validation of pore scale models. Comparing predicted effective properties to experimentally measured values is useful and necessary, but is complicated by the typical difference in size between the model and the experiment. Furthermore, it does not always give a clear indication of the reasons for an observed mismatch between models and experiments. Comparing two-phase flow models to pore scale experiments in which the evolution of the fluid distributions is visualized is thus extremely useful. However, this requires to image the two-phase flow process while it is taking place in a rock, and it is necessary to do this with time resolutions on the order of tens of seconds and spatial resolutions on the order of micrometers. Previous experimental approaches used synchrotron beam lines to achieve this. In this thesis, we show that such experiments are also possible using laboratory-based micro-computed tomography scanners, which are orders of magnitude cheaper and therefore more accessible than synchrotrons. An experiment in which kerosene was pumped into a water-saturated sandstone is presented, showing that individual Haines jumps (pore filling events) could be visualized during this drainage process. Because the image quality is lower than at synchrotrons, care had to be taken to adapt the image analysis work flow to deal with high image noise levels. The work flow was designed to allow to track the fluid filling state of individual pores. The results indicate that the dynamic effects due to viscous and inertial forces during Haines jumps do not significantly impact the evolution of the fluid distributions during drainage, which may thus be adequately described by quasi-static models

Entwicklung eines Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) Codes zur numerischen Vorhersage des Primärzerfalls an Brennstoffeinspritzdüsen

Aufgrund der strengen Schadstoffemissionsrestriktionen zukünftiger Triebwerke bedarf es der Entwicklung effizienter Triebwerkskonzepte. Eine Optimierung des Zerstäubersystems ist unerlässlich. Daher ist es wünschenswert, den Primärzerfall bei der Kraftstoffaufbereitung numerisch vorhersagen zu können. In diesem Forschungsbericht wird systematisch untersucht, ob und inwiefern die gitterfreie Lagrange\u27sche Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Methode in diesem Kontext anwendbar ist