Numerical calculation of permeability of periodic porous materials: Application to periodic arrays of spheres and 3D scaffold microstructures

Abstract

In this paper, an efficient numerical method is proposed to calculate the anisotropic permeability in porous materials characterized by a periodic microstructure. This method is based on pore-scale fluid dynamic simulations using a static volume of fluid method. Unlike standard solution procedures for this type of problem, we here solve an average constitutive equation over both fluid and solid domain by use of a subgrid model to accurately capture momentum transfer from the fluid to solid interface regions. Using numerical simulations on periodic arrays of spheres, we first demonstrate that, by using the subgrid interface model, more accurate results can be produced, for the velocity and pr..