ECCOMAS 2024

A TRT lattice-Boltzmann solver for pore-scale conjugate heat transfer in porous media

  • Schwendener, Dario (ETH Zurich)
  • Latt, Jonas (University Geneva)
  • Noir, Jerome (ETH Zurich)
  • Kong, Xiangzhao (ETH Zurich)

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Understanding conjugate heat transfer in porous media is essential for various applications in energy harvesting and storage, like geothermal heat extraction using supercritical CO2 and advanced thermal energy storage systems. This understanding not only facilitates the efficient utilization of resources but also contributes to the advancement of sustainable and effective energy solutions. Field-scale applications are conventionally executed at the Darcy scale. The closure of Darcy-scale governing equations relies on constitutive relationships derived from pore- scale insights [Karani and Huber, 2017, Liu et al., 2020]. These relationships are frequently parameterized using dimensionless numbers, including the Nusselt (Nu), Rayleigh (Ra), Reynolds (Re), Prandtl (Pr), Peclet (Pe), and Darcy (Da) numbers. The use of these dimensionless numbers facilitates the translation of pore-scale knowledge to field-scale applications. Answering these research questions is inherently dependent on pore-scale studies. Our focus has been on advancing a lattice-Boltzmann Methods (LBM) solver tailored for addressing conjugate heat transfer challenges in porous media arising from heterogeneous thermal properties. Rooted in the open-source STLBM repository [Latt et al., 2021], our solver has undergone refinement through the incorporation of the model proposed by Yue et al. [2021]. Our framework empowers multi-threaded, parallel LBM simulations, optimising computation efficiency across diverse computing environments, including state-of-the-art many-core CPUs and GPUs. We showcase critical benchmarks and initial results, emphasizing grid refinement analysis for enhanced simulation precision and sensitivity analysis on pivotal parameters, such as Ra, Re, and Pe to validate our model’s reliability. Additionally, we present perfor-mance benchmarks, demonstrating the efficiency of our LBM solver across a spectrum of computational environments. In conclusion, our work significantly enhances the understanding of convective heat trans-fer in porous media and lays a solid foundation for future pore-scale investigations. The development of our LBM solver marks a crucial advancement in modelling complex thermal systems, offering valuable insights for optimising heat and mass transport in a range of applications.