Simulation Of Viscoelastic Fluid Flow Mechanism In Porous Media Via Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

The actual engineering applications often face the problem of fluid flow in porous media, for example, the low permeability reservoir development, the exploitation of the gas layer, ground water and so on. With the continuing development of the country’s industrialization process, the role of oil in promoting the rapid development of China’s economy is more and more important. There is an urgent need to further improve the oil recovery efficiency for China’s oil exploitation industry. For such practical problems, this paper using the characteristics of fluid flow in porous media as background, introduced a meshless method Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method among all kinds of method which are widely used in this area before. This method is a non-grid, Lagrangian particle method, it is a numerical method used in the continuous medium dynamics. This method shows great advantages comparing to traditional grid method in dealing with the moving material interface and large deformation problems, because it doesn’t require meshing and reconstruction. Recently this method has been widely used in the field of classical Newtonian mechanics, etc. However, the application of numerical simulation of non-Newtonian fluid mechanics started late.Firstly, the paper introduced the basic concepts of the meshless method and especially SPH method, including its history development and current status. Both of the advantages and the disadvantages are described in the paper, and pointed out its field of application. This article lists the basic formulas of SPH method and a detailed description of some other concept includes support domain and influence domain, kernel functions, etc.Secondly, the paper listed some of the processing methods which have important roles in the numerical processing, for example, nearest neighbor particle searching method, time step selection, density initialization, etc. Then we simulated the classic shear-driven cavity flow to verify the correctness of the program. By comparing the simulation results when using different kernel functions, we can conclude that under the condition of using the particular support domain of the smooth function, all these three smooth functions had a good result with little difference. But the cubic spline function needs a short computing time under the more narrow support domain condition because it requires less particles than the other two methods. Finally, the SPH method is extended to simulate the viscoelastic fluid flow. By choosing the appropriate constitutive equation which is able to describe the viscoelastic fluid flow characteristic and combining with the SPH method to write the program for this study. We simulated the classic Poisuille flow with viscoelastic fluid to verify the correctness of the program. In this process we also analyzed some of the parameters which had caused changes in fluid flow, just as We, Re, β。And we simulated the viscoelastic fluid flowing in the blind pore with the change of some specific parameters. The simulation results show that different blind pore angles and different fluid parameters will impact the viscoelastic fluid flow within the blind pore. In practical engineering, these results can be used as basis to improve the oil displacement efficiency.