Particle-Based Direct Numerical Simulation of Contaminant Transport and Deposition in Porous Flow

This work describes an approach to porous flow modeling in which the “micro-length scale to macro-length scale” physical descriptions are addressed as Lagrangian, pore-level flow and transport. The flow features of the physical domain are solved by direct numerical simulation (DNS) with a grid-free, hybrid smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) numerical method (Berry, 2002) based on a local Riemann solution. In addition to being able to handle the large deformation, fluid–fluid and fluid–solid interactions within the contorted geometries of intra- and inter-pore-scale modeling, this Riemann–SPH method should be able to simulate other complexities, such as multiple fluid phases and chemical, particulate, and microbial transport with volumetric and surface reactions. A simple model is presented for the transfer of a contaminant from a carrier fluid to solid surfaces and is demonstrated for flow in a simulated porous media.