Achievement

IGERT fellow Nathan Lane showed that the ability to intelligently coarsen a tetrahedral mesh can significantly reduce the computational requirement of a flow simulation. A challenge when coarsening a tetrahedral mesh of a permeable media is ensuring that the interconnected path through the material is preserved. As it is the internal pore structure that dictates the properties of the porous material (like permeability), any pore-scale simulation technique should respect this pore structure. For a set of simulations conducted on a sample of Berea Sandstone we were able to show that a 55% reduction in the number of elements required to represent the 3D void space preserved the pore level connectivity of the material. Although mesh coarsening resulted in an increased permeability, this was attributed to a slight increase in the porosity of the coarse mesh. Current work is focused on a modified algorithm to ensure that meshes are matched by porosity