Iranian Researcher Discover Novel Method to Study Fluid Flow through Porous Media
Milad Ramezanpour, the executive director of a project entitled "Simulation of nanofluid flow at the scale of a cavity in a porous medium reconstructed by microtomography images" said that the project was conducted under the supervision of Majid Siavashi at Tehran-based IUST, adding, “The use of numerical method is considered as an efficient means alongside the experimental methods in today's research in engineering sciences because the use of numerical methods is not as costly as experimental methods and make it possible to study different states at low financial and time costs in a certain physics.”
“With the advancement of measurement tools, such as access to micrometer or even nanometer resolution images of the structure of a porous medium, it is possible to analyze the properties of fluid flow, such as calculating permeability, how particles disperse, configuration of multi-phase flows inside the porous medium, and things like that. Therefore, the use of methods such as microtomographic imaging of the porous medium in millimeter or centimeter dimensions produces images with micrometer resolution,” the researcher further explained, according to a report by the Iran Nanotechnology Innovation Council (INIC).
“Using image reconstruction methods and with providing a physical model from it, it is possible to analyze the fluid flow behavior inside the reconstructed porous medium at the cavity scale. It can be said that locally producing a software method to calculate the fluid flow inside the porous medium at the cavity scale using microtomography images was the purpose of this project. By designing this software method, it is possible to predict the behavior of all types of fluids in the porous media,” Ramezanpour continued.
“With the implementation of this plan and its development, the calculation tool of fluid flow in porous media is formed at the cavity scale. This computing tool reduces the costs of testing on different porous media and the behavior of different types of fluids with different properties inside them and provides the possibility of predicting it using an efficient method based on numerical calculations.”
“The interesting thing is that this tool has been widely used in the world during the last two decades, and gradually with the progress of existing hardware and software, it has become an efficient tool for predicting fluid behavior. Given the broad applications of this knowledge in industrial fields, creating an infrastructure for its development inside the country would result in the development of tools for predicting the behavior of the porous media at the lowest cost,” he went on to say.
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