Lattice Boltzmann modeling of permeability in porous materials with partially percolating voxels

A partial-bounce-back lattice Boltzmann model has been used to simulate flow on a lattice consisting of cubic voxels with a locally varying effective percolating fraction. The effective percolating fraction of a voxel is the total response to the partial-bounce-back techniques for porous media flow due to subvoxel fine structures. The model has been verified against known analytic solutions on two- and three-dimensional regular geometries, and has been applied to simulate flow and permeabilities of two real-world rock samples. This enables quantitative determination of permeability for problems where voxels cannot be adequately segmented as discrete compositions. The voxel compositions are represented as volume fractions of various material phases and void. The numerical results have shown that, for the tight-sandstone sample, the bulk permeability is sensitive to the effective percolating fraction of calcite. That is, the subvoxel flow paths in the calcite phase are important for bulk permeability. On the other hand, flow in the calcite phase in the sandstone sample makes an insignificant contribution to the bulk permeability. The calculated permeability value for the sandstone sample is up to two orders of magnitude greater than the tight sandstone. This model is generic and could be applied to other oil and gas reservoir media or to material samples.