《SPH modelling of fluid at the grain level in a porous medium》.pdf

Applied Mathematical Modelling 35 (2011) 1666–1675 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Mathematical Modelling journal homepage: www.else /locate/apm SPH modelling of fluid at the grain level in a porous medium G.G. Pereira ⇑, M. Prakash, P.W. Cleary CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics, Private Bag 33, Clayton South, Vic 3169, Australia a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Computational modelling of the flow of fluids in porous media has traditionally been at a Received 30 August 2010 macroscopic level where the medium’s permeability and porosity are an input (from Accepted 17 September 2010 experiments for example). In many cases this is difficult, especially if the porous medium Available online 26 September 2010 changes its solid structure as a function of time. This situation occurs in reactive systems such as ‘‘heap-leaching”, where biological and/or chemical solutions are introduced into Keywords: the heap to dissolve or react with valuable materials. In this case, modelling fluid flow at Smoothed particle hydrodynamics the grain level is paramount and we show how this can be done with the SPH technique. Porous media We present three-dimensional SPH simulations of fluid flow in an idealised porous med- Permeability ium and show that the technique yields flows which are physically realisti