Upscaled Lattice Boltzmann Method for Simulations of Flows in Heterogeneous Porous Media

Abstract: A upscaled lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for flow simulations in heterogeneous porous media, at both pore and Darcy scales, is proposed in this paper. In the micro-scale simulations, we model flows using LBM with the modified Guo et al. algorithm where we replace the force model with a simple Shan-Chen force model. The proposed upscaled LBM uses coarser grids to represent the effects of the fine-grid (pore-scale) simulations. For the upscaled LBM, effective properties and reduced-order models are proposed as we coarsen the grid. The effective properties are computed using solutions of local problems (e.g., by performing local LBM simulations) subject to some boundary conditions. A upscaled LBM that can reduce the computational complexity of existing LBM and transfer the information between different scales is implemented. The results of coarse-grid, reduced-order, simulations agree very well with averaged results obtained using a fine grid.