Such systems are of interest to both the groundwater community, with application to remediation of immiscible contaminant, and the petroleum industry, for application to enhanced oil recovery and remediation of oil fields. In this effort we take a pore scale approach, to directly account for the fundamental physical processes that affect fluid behavior. The LB approach allows us to incorporate basic fluid and rock properties, such as pore space geometry, wettability, interfacial tensions, with fundamental fluid dynamics, and obtainsolutions for the flow equations in a very complex pore network. Figure 1a Figure 1b Figure 1a and b Oil displacement by water flood. In a two dimensional pore space.
Water is shown in red, oil is shown in blue, and the porous medium is shown in black.
These fluid packets move and interact on the lattice, with a set of rules that governs what happens when the packets collide at the nodes of the lattice. With the proper choice of geometric lattice and interaction rules these systems can reproduce flow and transport of highly complex systems, with multiple fluids and heterogeneous porous media. Our model is capable of simulating fluid flow in three-dimensional porous media of arbitrary pore geometry and rock surface characteristics, with up to three fluids having arbitrary density, viscosity, and interfacial tension ratios. Thus, the model has the flexibility to reproduce a majority of the systems of interest in groundwater or petroleum systems. Using the CM5 we regularly use porous medium domains of dimension 128x128x128 and 256x256x256.