At the macroscopic level, new constitutive equations that account for flow-dependent structures are being developed, and implemented within Finite Element Method codes. Because these simulations are very large, massive parallelism is needed. As a result, the codes are implemented in such a way that good scalability is obtained. Flow in porous media. Flow in porous media is important in the area of filtering, underground flow, CO2 sequestration.
Porous media are geometrically very complex.
In order to accurately model the effect of the geometry on the permeability characteristics of the media, Boundary Element Method models are being constructed. In the near future, these models will be combined with models for multiphase fluids to treat multiphase flow in porous media. Flow at moderate Reynolds numbers. Velocity-based formulations suffer from a relative lack of accuracy due to the numerical differentiation of velocity fields necessary to treat the equations of flow. Vorticity-based formulations do not suffer from this problem, and can provide more accurate solutions with a coarser discretization.