February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics, Vol. 00, No. 00, December 2005, 115 Lattice-Boltzmann simulations in reconstructed parametrized porous media BENJAMIN AHRENHOLZ, JONAS TÖLKE, MANFRED KRAFCZYK (Received 00 Month 200x; In nal form 00 Month 200x) Computations of ows in explicitly resolved porous media reported in the literature so far are based on binarized porous media data mapped to uniform Cartesian grids. The voxel set is directly being used as the computational grid and thus the geometrical representation is usually only rst-order accurate due to staircase patterns. In this work we pursue a more elaborate approach: Starting from a highly resolved tomographic grey value data set we utilize a marching-cube algorithm to reconstruct the surface of the porous medium as a set of planar triangles. The numerical resolution of the Cartesian grid for the simulation can then be chosen independently from the voxel set. As we take into account the subgrid distances between the nodes of the Cartesian grid and the planar triangle surfaces, one can utilize a second-order accurate Lattice-Boltzmann ow solver to eciently compute e.g. permeabilities. As these interpolation-based no-slip boundary conditions are not mass preserving, we also present a local modication of the no-slip boundary condition restoring mass conservation. Our numerical results demonstrate, that for saturated ow simulations this coupled approach allows a substantial acceleration of saturated ow computations in porous media. Keywords: lattice-Boltzmann; porous media; marching cubes 1 Introduction Numerical models based on the lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) have matured as a well established tool for solving complex problems in uid dynamics. A popular LBE model for simulating ows in porous media is the well known LBGK (lattice Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook) model (Qian et al. 1992), in combination with a simple bounce back scheme for the solid-uid boundaries (Ginzburg and d'Humières 2003). This approach has two disadvantages. First its numerical stability is relatively limited. Second, the simplied nature of the bounce-back scheme implies that the true position of the wall is depending on the value of the relaxation time used for the simulation, i.e. the permeability of a porous medium becomes viscosity dependent (Ginzbourg and Adler 1994). These problems can be drastically reduced by using a multiplerelaxation-time model (d'Humières 1992, Lallemand and Luo 2000, d'Humières et al. 2002), which not only improves numerical stability but also eliminates the viscosity dependence of the permeability (Ginzburg and d'Humières 2003). Furthermore, the simple bounce back scheme has to be replaced by a boundary condition whose convergence behaviour is consistent with the methods bulk behaviour, e.g. (Bouzidi et al. 2001). Simulations investigating ow in porous media using MRT and higher order boundary conditions have been carried out for simple analytic geometries such as body centred arrays of spheres (Ginzburg and d'Humières 2003), as well for polydisperse sphere packings (Pan et al. 2005). In this paper we combine a MRT-LB model with second-order boundary conditions for the simulation of single-phase ow in reconstructed porous media. The paper is organized as follows: In Section 2 we describe the reconstruction of the geometry of porous media by using a marching cube algorithm to decouple the numerical grid from its voxel based data. Section 3 describes the numerical model and its implementation. In section 4.1 numerical experiments for a body centred cubic array of spheres to validate the approach have been carried out. In section 4.2 ow simulations in reconstructed parameterized porous media using second order boundary conditions have been performed and demonstrate the eciency of our approach. ∗ Corresponding author. Email: {ahrenholz,toelke,kraft}@cab.bau.tu-bs.de International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics ISSN 1061-8562 print / ISSN 1029-0257 online c 2005 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/10618560xxxxxxxxxxxxx February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Benjamin Ahrenholz, Jonas Tölke, Manfred Krafczyk 2 2 Decoupling the numerical grid from the tomography based voxel set 2.1 Motivation Most uid simulations in resolved porous media that are based on natural or real-world geometries are derived from tomography scans or similar extraction methods. These tomography scans are usually converted to binary voxel sets which are directly utilized as the computational grid and thus have the same resolution as the voxel matrix. The immediate consequence of this method is an implicit coupling of the resolution of the geometry with the computational (i.e. numerical) grid. This has two distinct disadvantages: a) an intrinsical stair-case representation of the geometry and b) convergence studies are hard to perform, because from a numerical point of view, it would be necessary to have scans of dierent resolutions. To evade this limitations we are introducing an approach, which is based on voxel geometries (Lehmann et al. 2006) represented by grey values and that will reconstruct a plane triangle mesh to obtain a second order accurate geometric representation of the pore space. A sample of a porous medium (Kaestner et al. 2005) with a dimension of 8003 voxels and a triangulated section of the same sample are shown in Figure 1 and 2. Figure 1. X-ray scan of a porous medium measured at HASYLAB (courtesy of Kaestner and Lehmann (Lehmann et al. 2006)) February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Second order accurate Lattice-Boltzmann ow simulations in reconstructed parametrized porous media 3 Figure 2. Section of a triangulated surface of a porous medium 2.2 Isocontour algorithm For triangulation one can utilize dierent types of isocontour/isosurface algorithms. In this work we adopted a variant of the marching cube family which for our application is favourable due to its ability to conserve topological quantities to a large extent (Lewiner et al. 2003) and which is designed to avoid cracks in the surface. Marching Cubes (Lorensen and Cline 1987) is a computer graphics algorithm for extracting a polygonal mesh of an isosurface from a 3D discrete scalar eld. The algorithm successively scans the scalar eld, groups 8 voxels to an imaginary cube and determines the polygons whose cutting plane represents the isosurface of the predened scalar value in this cube. This computation can be accelerated by creating an index array of the 28 = 256 possible polygon congurations which serve as a look-up table in all subsequent cube computations. The look-up table can be further condensed by symmetry arguments to as few as fteen unique cases. These basic congurations are shown in gure 3. February 9, 2007 4 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Benjamin Ahrenholz, Jonas Tölke, Manfred Krafczyk Figure 3. Representation of the 15 base congurations of the Marching Cube algorithm Finally each vertex of the generated polygons is placed on the appropriate position along the cube's edge by linearly interpolating the two scalar values of its corresponding two nodes. The result is a mesh of triangles representing the geometric structure of a voxel set. Especially in the case of a natural porous medium with its arbitrary geometrical complexity it is crucial to have a consistent mesh of triangles, because cracks will lead to leaks which again will lead to wrong surface orientations (A pore may be interpreted as solid and vice versa). It turned out, that even our implemented type of Marching Cubes can lead to wrong triangle congurations under certain conditions. In that case we are forced to correct the mesh by checking the connectivity of the triangle mesh. If a triangle has less than three neighbouring faces, it is part of rare triangulation conguration, which can appear in very narrow channels. Then it is safe to delete the aected triangle to keep the topological quantity. After the geometric reconstruction the triangulation is used to generate the numerical grid, whose resolution can now be freely chosen. While the grid is adapted to the mesh, we calculate the distances from the Cartesian grid nodes to the triangles describing the outer walls. These distances will be used later as so-called q-values for the boundary conditions (see section 3.2). A recursive ll algorithm then separates uid, boundary and solid nodes for the upcoming simulation. 2.3 Calculation of subgrid distances To apply higher order boundary conditions based on linear or quadratic interpolations (Bouzidi et al. 2001) or the even more complex multi-reection boundary scheme (Ginzburg and d'Humières 2003), the projected distances between the boundary grid node and the reconstructed surface along the links of the stencil are required. A representation of boundary nodes (quadratic dots) in pore space with their corresponding links qi , consistent with the D3Q19 model, is shown in Figure 4. February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Second order accurate Lattice-Boltzmann ow simulations in reconstructed parametrized porous media 5 Figure 4. Boundary nodes with subgrid distances qi The links and their length have only been calculated once as a part of the pre-processing, as the geometry of the porous medium is assumed not to depend on time. For calculations with voxel scans up to a size of 8003 the triangulation algorithm in the pre-processing step required between 100 and 200 million triangles for a reconstructed surface for the medium under consideration and generally depends on the mediums topology as well its porosity. The time consumption is moderate: triangulation and computation of the subgrid distances requires about 4 hours on a 2 GHz Opteron and 32 GB memory. The algorithm has an optimum complexity of N (logN ) where N is the number of triangles. 3 The LB Method for single-phase ow with second order accuracy 3.1 The Multi Relaxation Time Model (MRT) In the following section x represents a 3D vector in space and f a b-dimensional vector, where b is the number of microscopic velocities. We use the so-called d3q19 model (Qian et al. 1992) with the following February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Benjamin Ahrenholz, Jonas Tölke, Manfred Krafczyk 6 microscopic velocities, ( {ei , i = 0, . . . , 18} = 0 c −c 0 0 0 0 c −c c −c c −c c −c 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 c −c 0 0 c −c −c c 0 0 0 0 c −c c −c 0 0 0 0 0 c −c 0 0 0 0 c −c −c c c −c −c c ) , where c is a constant velocity related to the speed of sound by c2s = c2 /3. The generalized lattice Boltzmann (GLB) equation using the multi-relaxation time model introduced by (d'Humières 1992, Lallemand and Luo 2000) is used in this paper in a slightly modied version (Tölke et al. 2004). The lattice Boltzmann equation is given by fi (t + ∆t, x + ei ∆t) = fi (t, x) + Ωi , i = 0, . . . , b − 1, (1) where ∆t is the time step, the grid spacing is ∆x = c∆t and the collision operator is given by Ω = M−1 S ((Mf ) − meq ) . (2) The matrix M given in appendix A transforms the distributions into moment space. The resulting moments m = Mf are labelled as m = (δρ, e, , jx , qx , jy , qy , jz , qz , 3pxx , 3πxx , pww , πww , pxy , pyz , pxz , mx , my , mz ), where δρ is a density variation related to the pressure variation δp by δp = c2s δρ, (3) and (jx , jy , jz ) = ρ0 (ux , uy , uz ) the momentum, where ρ0 is a constant reference density. The moments e, pxx , pww , pxy , pyz , pxz are related to the stress tensor by σxx = −(1 − σyy = −(1 − σzz = −(1 − σxy = −(1 − σyz = −(1 − σxz = −(1 − sν 1 )( e + pxx − ρ0 u2x ) 2 3 sν 1 1 1 )( e − pxx + pww − ρ0 u2y ) 2 3 2 2 sν 1 1 1 )( e − pxx − pww − ρ0 u2z ) 2 3 2 2 sν )(pxy − ρ0 ux uy ) 2 sν )(pyz − ρ0 uy uz ) 2 sν )(pxz − ρ0 ux uz ). 2 (4a) (4b) (4c) (4d) (4e) (4f) Here sν is a collision rate explained later. The other moments of higher order have no physical meaning for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The vector meq is composed of the equilibrium moments February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Second order accurate Lattice-Boltzmann ow simulations in reconstructed parametrized porous media 7 given by meq 0 = δρ (5a) eq 2 2 2 meq 1 = e = ρ0 (ux + uy + uz ) (5b) meq 3 = ρ0 u x (5c) meq 5 meq 7 = ρ0 u y (5d) = ρ0 u z (5e) 2 2 2 = 3peq xx = ρ0 (2 ux − uy − uz ) (5f) eq 2 2 meq 11 = pzz = ρ0 (uy − uz ) (5g) eq meq 13 = pxy = ρ0 ux uy (5h) eq meq 14 = pyz = ρ0 uy uz (5i) meq 9 eq meq 15 = pxz = ρ0 ux uz meq 2 = meq 4 = meq 6 = meq 8 = meq 16 = meq 17 (5j) = meq 18 =0 (5k) The matrix S is a diagonal collision matrix composed of relaxation rates {si,i , . . . , b − 1}, also called the eigenvalues of the collision matrix M−1 S M. The rates dierent from zero are s1,1 = −se s2,2 = −s s4,4 = s6,6 = s8,8 = −sq s10,10 = s12,12 = −sπ s9,9 = s11,11 = s13,13 = s14,14 = s15,15 = −sν s16,16 = s17,17 = s18,18 = −sm . The relaxation rate sν is related to the kinematic viscosity ν by sν = 1 3 c2ν∆t + 1 2 . (6) The other relaxation rates se , s , sq , sπ and sm can be freely chosen in the range [0, 2] and may be tuned to improve accuracy and/or stability (Lallemand and Luo 2000). The optimal values depend on the specic system under consideration (geometry, initial and boundary conditions) and can not be computed in advance for general cases. These values will be discussed in more detail in the sections dealing with the numerical examples. Using either a Chapman-Enskog expansion Frisch et al. (1987) or an asymptotic expansion using the diusive scaling (Junk et al. 2005), it can be shown that the LB method is a scheme of rst order in time and second order in space for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. 3.2 Boundary conditions The macroscopic ow quantities can only be set implicitly via incoming particle distribution functions on the boundary nodes. A well known and simple way to introduce no-slip walls is the so-called bounce back scheme which allows spatial second order accuracy if the boundary is aligned with one of the lattice vectors February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Benjamin Ahrenholz, Jonas Tölke, Manfred Krafczyk 8 ei and rst order otherwise (Ginzburg and d'Humières 2003). As we have arbitrarily shaped objects, we use the modied bounce back scheme developed in (Bouzidi et al. 2001, Lallemand and Luo 2003) for velocity boundary conditions, which is second order accurate for arbitrarily shaped boundaries (gure 5). q<1/2 q 1 F q>1/2 D 1 W A t F t fi,A t fi,F q A W D W t fi,A t fI,A 2q-1 2q F D D A W t+1 F A t+1 fI,A t+1 fI,A Figure 5. Interpolations for second order bounce back scheme. Here we identify two cases: (i) the wall has a distance less then 0.5 ei ∆t from the node and (ii) the wall has a distance between 0.5 and 1.0 ei ∆t from the node. ei u w , c2 2q − 1 t 1 ei u w t = · fI,A + · fi,A −3 2 , 2q 2q qc t+1 t t (i) fI,A = (1 − 2q) · fi,F + 2q · fi,A −6 0.0 < q < 0.5 (7) (ii) 0.5 ≤ q ≤ 1.0 (8) t+1 fI,A Distributions at time t/t + 1 are post/pre-collision values, qei ∆t is the distance to the wall and uw the velocity at the wall. Therefore we obtain second order accurate results in space even for curved geometries (Geller et al. 2006). For a detailed discussion of LBE boundary conditions we refer to (Ginzburg and d'Humières 2003). In contrast to the simple bounce-back scheme the use of this interpolation based no-slip boundary conditions result in a notable mass loss across the no-slip lines. To circumvent this problem we transfer the mass dierence to the rest particle distribution. This results in a bounce back scheme which is conservative in mass (and thus pressure) while introducing a higher-order disturbance of the stress tensor which does not change the results signicantly. The results obtained with the rst-order bounce-back were inferior to the second-order scheme which highlights the importance of a proper geometric resolution of the ow domain. Pressure boundary conditions are implemented by setting the incoming distributions as (Thürey 2003) February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Second order accurate Lattice-Boltzmann ow simulations in reconstructed parametrized porous media fI = −fi + fIeq (P0 , u) + fieq (P0 , u) 9 (9) where P0 is the prescribed pressure, eI = −ei and u is obtained by extrapolation. 3.3 Implementation A simple lattice Boltzmann algorithm can be implemented easily, however, more advanced approaches in terms of accuracy, speed and memory consumption require careful programming. The simulation kernel used for the numerical experiments has been implemented using the Fortran 90 standard. The eciency of matrix based data structures and its convenient syntax for numerical problems were the determining factor. The parallelization follows a distributed memory approach using a Message Passing Interface (MPI-Forum 2006). The kernel has been optimized with respect to speed in the rst place, by e.g. using two arrays for storing the distribution functions. Collision and propagation have been combined into a single nested loop. The array containing the subgrid distances (q-values) is indexed by a list as they are only needed for the uid-solid boundary nodes. The simple bounce back scheme does not require the exchange of all neighbouring distributions due to its local nature. Therefore it would be sucient to exchange only the ve distributions pointing into communication direction. However, while using the interpolated bounce back schemes it is necessary to exchange also the distributions necessary for the interpolation, which will slightly, increase the parallelization overhead. 4 Numerical experiments 4.1 Body centred periodic array of spheres Before running simulations in natural porous media with the introduced framework we validated the approach with an analytic geometry for which a semi-analytical solution is available: a body centred periodic array of spheres as shown in Figure 6. For this conguration one can derive a solution following the work of (Hasimoto 1959) and (Sangani and Acrivos 1982). The drag force of one sphere can be computed as: (10) F = Cd · 6πµud a where Cd is the dimensionless drag, µ the dynamic viscosity and ud the Darcy velocity. The drag can be determined as a function of the solid volume fraction c by a series expansion: Cd = 30 X n=0 n αn χ , χ = ( c cmax 1/3 ) 8πa3 , c= , cmax = 3L3 √ 3π 8 (11) The drag only depends on the characteristics of the geometry, which are dened by L and a (see also Fig. 7). February 9, 2007 10 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Benjamin Ahrenholz, Jonas Tölke, Manfred Krafczyk Figure 7. 2D projection of the sphere array. Figure 6. A BCC array of spheres in periodic space. The permeability of the medium can then be derived by considering the region depicted in Fig. 7. Taking into account that the region contains two spheres (Adler 1992) in sum we can compute the average pressure gradient in z-direction as −∂z p = 2F . L3 (12) The Darcy velocity using equation (17) is then u= κ 2F . µ L3 (13) Substituting equation 10 in equation (13) we obtain for the intrinsic permeability κ κ= L3 . 12πaCd (14) The dimensionless permeability κ∗ is κ∗ = κ 1 = · a2 12πCd 3 L . a (15) The geometry used in the simulation has been modelled using a common geometric modelling tool, such as AutoCAD (AutoCAD 2006) or Microstation (Microstation 2006). The triangle mesh was generated using the grid generation tool as described in section 2. Therefore it was easy to create grids in dierent resolutions using always the same input-model. The smallest grid used 103 nodes and the largest up to 1203 . The setup for the simulation is a LB-simulation core using the MRT-model and the 'magic'-relaxation parameters given below according to (Ginzburg 2005). These parameters eliminate the permeability dependence on viscosity for simulations using Stokes ow (i.e. neglecting the second order terms of the equilibrium distributions) for simple bounce-back and reduce them substantially in the case of interpolation February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Second order accurate Lattice-Boltzmann ow simulations in reconstructed parametrized porous media 11 based bounce back by relaxing the even and odd moments dierently: se = s = sπ = sν , sq = sm = 8 (2 − sν ) (8 − sν ) (16) Permeability is determined by measuring the volume averaged uid velocity (Darcy velocity) after reaching a stationary state. From Darcy's law one can calculate the uid permeability, ud = − κ (∂z p + ρg) ρν (17) which is then compared to the theoretical solution given by (Hasimoto 1959, Sangani and Acrivos 1982). Figures 8 and 9 show the comparison for dierent values of χ. Fig. 8 reveals that the accuracy of the simulation using the linear interpolated bounce back schemes for a resolution of about 143 grid nodes is comparable to the one from the truncated series expansion of the theoretical solution (relative error below 1%). The variations of the numerical results even for low resolutions can be explained by the type of setup. The numerical grid is intentionally not aligned to the geometry but is created using a small oset, which is always as large as half the grid spacing. This displacement of the grid results in a non-symmetrical setup and is considered to t better to a natural porous medium and more importantly is supposed to avoid the cancellation and therefore the reduction of errors due to a symmetrical setup. At higher resolutions this out of alignment will have less impact to the obtained results, which explains the relatively high error at low resolutions. The newly introduced simple mechanism for a mass conservative interpolated bounce back scheme gives the same order of convergence, but it is not as accurate as the classical boundary condition. However, it may be useful for setups where a mass conservative scheme is mandatory and quadratic convergence is required. The simple bounce back scheme cannot compete here; for an accurate solution one would require resolutions beyond 1003 which would require almost three orders of additional CPU-power and memory. rel. error [%] 1,0E+02 K [SBB] K [LIBB] K [LIBB FIX] N -1 1,0E+01 Accuracy of Ref.-Sol. 1,0E+00 1,0E-01 N -2 1,0E-02 10 100 resolution [voxel] Figure 8. Plot comparing the accuracy of simple and linear interpolated BB with χ = 0.76. February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction Benjamin Ahrenholz, Jonas Tölke, Manfred Krafczyk 12 1,0E+02 rel. error [%] K [SBB] K [LIBB Fix] K [LIBB] 1,0E+01 N-1 Accuracy of Ref.-Sol. 1,0E+00 N-2 1,0E-01 10 100 resolution [voxel] 1000 Figure 9. Plot comparing the accuracy of simple and linear interpolated BB with χ = 0.96. 4.2 Convergence study for a natural porous medium Present neutron tomography or X-rays from synchrotron scanners are capable of scanning grey value images reaching voxel resolutions of a few microns. Thus one can perform uid simulations in natural porous media with voxel resolutions up to 109 voxels. However, the demands of a simulation with a computational grid of the same size are very high. To demonstrate the gain of decoupling the numerical grid from the geometrical voxel description we performed a convergence study based on tomography scans of sand cubes. The data sources were subsets of the sand sample introduced in section 2 with a size of 2503 which corresponds to a size of 1.25 mm2 which is app. 5-7 times the diameter of a typical pore diameter. Multiple simulations at dierent resolutions have been carried out and the corresponding results are shown in table 1 and gure 10. The resolution shown in the rst column indicates the factor in grid size from the original voxelbased geometry resolution of 250. The reference permeability of the medium has been calculated using a Richardson extrapolation. Table 1. Relative permeability at dierent resolutions. 4.3 Resolution Voxel rel. K (SBB) rel. K (LIBB) rel. error SBB [%] rel. error LIBB [%] 1.75 1.5 1.0 0.75 0.5 0.3 436 374 250 187 125 76 3.8137092E-05 3.7605696E-05 3.5834207E-05 3.4072388E-05 2.9753718E-05 1.7191929E-05 4.1587915E-05 4.1800425E-05 4.2637626E-05 4.3666093E-05 4.6620740E-05 5.4151301E-05 8.915E+00 1.045E+01 1.591E+01 2.191E+01 3.960E+01 1.416E+02 1.222E-01 6.300E-01 2.581E+00 4.876E+00 1.090E+01 2.329E+01 Computational issues At the highest resolution used in the simulations, which was 4363 , the memory consumption is quite large. Even this is a single ow simulation and basically only one set of 19 double precision values are necessary, the array containing the q-values for each boundary node consumes also 19 oat values. Additional ghost nodes, which are mandatory for non local interpolation schemes in combination with parallelization cause additional hardware resources. However, the time used for the collision and propagation steps of the LB February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction rel. error [%] Second order accurate Lattice-Boltzmann ow simulations in reconstructed parametrized porous media 1,0E+03 13 rel. error SBB rel. error LIBB 1,0E+02 1,0E+01 N -1 1,0E+00 N -2 1,0E-01 10 100 1000 resolution [grid nodes] Figure 10. Plot comparing absolute permeability depending on the resolution. scheme is comparably large. Thus a very good parallel eciency is still observed; especially in the case of asynchronous communication. Based on the results of the convergence study we nd, that using a lower grid resolution than the original voxel set, one can obtain results which are of a comparable accuracy as the reference solution, using full resolution and simple bounce back. Thus from the corresponding runtimes we can see that the computational eciency rises by at least one order of magnitude when using the parameterized reconstruction. For the porous medium used in our simulations we achieve a relative error below 10% in permeability using a grid with a resolution factor of 0.5 and interpolated bounce back. With a simple bounce back scheme one has to use at least a resolution factor of 1.5 to obtain a result of comparable accuracy. That leads to a gain in eciency - saving CPU time, memory consumption, etc. - by a factor of 16. 5 Conclusions In this work we demonstrate that second order accuracy and a signicant speedup in convergence can be achieved not only for ow simulations based on CAD-Type geometries, but also from scanned data such as porous media ow in sand. In contrary to LBGK models with single-relaxation-time in combination with the simple bounce back scheme, the MRT model in combination with higher order boundary conditions are more accurate and due to its faster convergence to a steady state far more ecient. The additional costs in terms of pre-processing and decreased locality of the boundary stencil are more than balanced by the increase in numerical eciency. Finally, we would like to point out, that for the simulation of ows in deformable porous media (uid-structure-interaction) the parameterization of the geometry is mandatory to consistently compute the structural deformation including contact problems. February 9, 2007 10:33 International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics single_phase_reconstruction REFERENCES 14 Acknowledgments Financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the framework of the German LatticeBoltzmann Research Group is gratefully acknowledged. Also many thanks to Peter Lehmann and Anders Kästner from ETH Zürich for providing the high quality x-ray scans of sand samples. Appendix A: Transformation matrix M 1· (1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1) 2 c · (−1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1) 4 c · (1 −2 −2 −2 −2 −2 −2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1) c· (0 1 −1 0 0 0 0 1 −1 1 −1 1 −1 1 −1 0 0 0 0) 3 c · (0 −2 2 0 0 0 0 1 −1 1 −1 1 −1 1 −1 0 0 0 0) c· (0 0 0 1 −1 0 0 1 −1 −1 1 0 0 0 0 1 −1 1 −1) c3 · (0 0 0 −2 2 0 0 1 −1 −1 1 0 0 0 0 1 −1 1 −1) c· (0 0 0 0 0 1 −1 0 0 0 0 1 −1 −1 1 1 −1 −1 1) c3 · (0 0 0 0 0 −2 2 0 0 0 0 1 −1 −1 1 1 −1 −1 1) 2 c · (0 2 2 −1 −1 −1 −1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 −2 −2 −2 −2) 4 c · (0 −2 −2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 −2 −2 −2 −2) 2 c · (0 0 0 1 1 −1 −1 1 1 1 1 −1 −1 −1 −1 0 0 0 0) 4 c · (0 0 0 −1 −1 1 1 1 1 1 1 −1 −1 −1 −1 0 0 0 0) 2 c · (0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 −1 −1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0) 2 c · (0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 −1 −1) c2 · (0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 −1 −1 0 0 0 0) c3 · (0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 −1 1 −1 −1 1 −1 1 0 0 0 0) c3 · (0 0 0 0 0 0 0 −1 1 1 −1 0 0 0 0 1 −1 1 −1) 3 c · (0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 −1 −1 1 −1 1 1 −1) References Adler, P.M., Porous media: geometry and transports 1992 (ISBN 0-7506-9236-7: Butterworth-Heinemann). 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