Speaker
Description
We present a Volume-of-Solid (VoS) framework as an alternative methodology for modelling elastic deformation at the pore scale in complex porous geometries. The approach is designed for voxel-based simulations and enables elastic stress computation on simple, non-conforming meshes while accounting for fluid–solid interfaces in a consistent manner. Such a framework is particularly relevant for image-based domains and large-scale simulations, where traditional Direct numerical simulation (DNS) methods face significant practical limitations.
DNS of elastic stress typically relies on body-fitted, conforming meshes to accurately represent fluid–solid interfaces and mechanical boundary conditions. While effective for small simulations restricted to the solid phase, mesh generation is often complex, memory intensive, and difficult to parallelise, especially for high-resolution, image-based geometries. These challenges are further amplified when elastic deformation is coupled with fluid flow, which may require different discretisations and non-trivial coupling strategies.
Single-domain penalisation approaches, such as Darcy–Brinkman–Biot (DBB) formulations, offer an attractive alternative by discretising the entire computational domain using Cartesian grids. In these methods, the solid phase is penalised through vanishing permeability, while the pore space is assigned negligible elasticity, enabling scalable and memory-efficient implementations. However, standard penalisation techniques do not recover the correct mechanical boundary conditions at fluid–solid interfaces, resulting in non-negligible errors in predicted stress fields.
The VoS framework addresses this limitation through a volume-averaged formulation in which the local solid volume fraction is used to immerse interfaces while consistently enforcing mechanical boundary conditions. This approach retains the robustness and scalability of single-domain methods while enabling accurate elastic stress evaluation in complex porous media. The framework provides a basis for large-scale coupled fluid–solid modelling and can, in future work, be integrated with DBB models for multiscale poromechanical simulations.
| Country | United Kingdom |
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