Computation of the permeability of porous materials from their microstructure by FFF-Stokes
Andreas Wiegmann
Abstract
A fully automatic procedure is proposed to rapidly compute the permeability of porous materials from their binarized microstructure.The discretization is a simplified version of Peskin's Immersed Boundary Method, where the forces are applied at the no-slip grid points.As needed for the computation of permeability, steady flows at zero Reynolds number are considered.Short run-times are achieved by eliminating the pressure and velocity variables using an Fast Fourier Transform-based and 4 Poisson problembased fast inversion approach on rectangular parallelepipeds with periodic boundary conditions.In reference to calling it a fast method using fictitious or artificial forces, the implementation is called FFF-Stokes.Large scale computations on 3d images are quickly and automatically performed to estimate the permeability of some sample materials.A matlab implementation is provided to allow readers to experience the automation and speed of the method for realistic three-dimensional models.