Pore-to-core simulations of flow with large velocities using continuum models and imaging data

We consider computational modeling of flow with small and large velocities at porescale and at corescale, and we address various challenges in simulation, upscaling, and modeling. While our focus is on voxel-based data sets from real porous media imaging, our methodology is verified first on synthetic geometries, and we analyze various scaling and convergence properties. We show that the choice of a voxel-based grid and representative elementary volume size can lead up to 10–20 % difference in calculated conductivities. On the other hand, the conductivities decrease significantly with flow rates, starting in a regime usually associated with the onset of inertia effects. This is accompanied by deteriorating porescale solver performance, and we continue our experiments up until about 50 % reduction in conductivities, i.e., to Reynolds number just under 1. To account for this decrease, we propose a practical power-based fully anisotropic non-Darcy model at corescale for which we calculate the parameters by upscaling.