An efficient Immersed Boundary Method based on penalized direct
forcing for simulating flows through arbitrary porous media.
The aim of this thesis project is the development of an efficient Immersed
Boundary Method (IBM) for simulating Stokes flow through the pores of an
arbitrary porous medium. The method is specifically designed to incorporate
geometrical data of a porous medium obtained from a Computed Tomography
(CT) scanner.
The accuracy of the IBM has been determined by a number of benchmark cases
of idealized geometries. The geometry of real porous media has been obtained
from high resolution micro-CT scans. To validate the simulations of real porous
media, a Darcy experiment has been developed to determine the permeability of
these porous media.
The results show that the IBM can be used to predict the permeability, through
Richardson extrapolation of the numerical results, of a real porous medium
within an error of 10% of the Darcy experiment and the semi-empirical CarmanKozeny relation.