A multiscale study of the retention behavior and hydraulic anisotropy in deformable porous media

Abstract

AbstractThe following proceeding presents a multiscale approach to investigate the hydraulic anisotropy and retention behavior in porous materials involving deformation effects. Concerning the former, single‐phasic fluid flow simulations using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) are initially accomplished at the pore‐level geometry of Bentheimer sandstones provided by X‐ray microscopy at several degrees of compression to compute the intrinsic permeability. Due to the anisotropic nature of the Bentheimer sandstones, favored pore channels for fluid flow are witnessed within the domain. Therefore, it is important to understand the alteration of the preferred flow paths at each degree of compression. In this regard, we propose a new upscaling approach between the LBM and the macroscopic Theory of Porous Media (TPM) to accurately compute the macroscopic hydraulic structural tensor, which plays a crucial role in the calculation of the deformation‐dependent anisotropic specific permeability. As for the latter, the Shan‐Chen (SC) model of the LBM is applied at each strain level to model biphasic fluid flow via the unsaturated porous domain. Herein, the retention curves of the drainage and imbibition processes of each deformed state are computed. In turn, the comparison among the results shows the effect of variation of the strain degree on the retention behavior.