Computational Fluid Dynamics in Unconsolidated Sediments: Model Generation and Discrete Flow Simulations

Numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes Equations became more popular in recent decades with increasingly accessible and powerful computational resources. Simulations in reconstructed or artificial pore geometries are often performed to gain insight into microscopic fluid flow structures or are used for upscaling quantities of interest, like hydraulic conductivity. A physically adequate representation of pore-scale flow fields requires analysis of large domains. We solve the incompressible NSE in artificial ordered and random pore-space structures. A simple cubic and face-centred packings of spheres placed in a square duct are analysed. For the fluid flow simulations of random media, packings of spheres, icosahedra, and cubes forming unconsolidated sediments are generated using a rigid body simulation software. The Direct Numerical Simulation method is used for the solution of the NSE implemented in the open-source computational fluid dynamics software OpenFOAM. The influence of the number of spheres in ordered packings, the mesh type, and the mesh resolution is investigated for fluid flow up to Reynolds numbers of 100 based on the spheres' diameter. The random media mesh generation method relies on approximate surface reconstruction. The resulting tetrahedral meshes are then used for steady-state simulations and refined based on an a-posteriori error estimator. The fluid flow simulation results can further be used twofold: 1) They provide homogenized hydro-mechanical properties of the analysed medium for the larger meso and macro groundwater flow simulations. A concept of one-way binding for large-scale simulations is presented. 2) Visualisation: A post-processing image rendering technique was employed in interactive and still image visualisation environments allowing better overview over local fluid flow structures. The ogs FEM code for the solution of large-scale groundwater processes was inspected for computational efficiency. The conclusions drawn from this analysis formed the~basis for the implementation of the~new version of the code---ogs6. The improvements include comparison of linear algebra software realisations and an implementation of optimized memory access patterns in FEM-local assembler part