Parallel computing of fluid flow through porous media

Sammanfattning: Fluid flow through porous media takes place in a variety of technical areas including ground water flow, flow through embankment dams, paper making, composites manufacturing, filtering, drying and sintering of iron ore pellets. When modelling these kinds of flows it is common practice to use averaging techniques rather than computing the detailed flow field in every single pore. This approach is very efficient when averaged quantities are sough for but it is not very convenient for local problems such as forces on particles within an embankment dam and drying of individual iron ore pellets. In this thesis the focus is set on the former and how such forces alter as a function of Reynolds number. Of particular interest are the effects of inertia and turbulence and when they need to be considered. For problem like this a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach is well suited since rather complex geometries and flow conditions can be studied by using parallel computing techniques. By using this technique it is also possible to determine at which flow regimes Darcy law is applicable and thus when more elaborate descriptions of the flow like the Forchheimer equation and the Navier-Stokes equations need to be applied. In order to isolate the question above and be able to use advanced models for turbulence a neat geometry is applied being an array of quadratic packed cylinders. To start with the parallel computing capacity of the in-house cluster is scrutinized showing very promising results with up to almost full scalability. Following this study focus is set on the porous media and when inertia-effects need to be taken into account. The significance of this phenomenon turns out to be when Reynolds number is above 10. Then a study in when the flow has to be solved with a full turbulent description has been carried out with the results that as the Reynolds number increases above 100 the significance is clear. In addition a manuscript for a state of the art literature survey is appended.