The prediction of multiphase flow through porous and fractured media is critical for many engineering applications from oil and gas production through to the transport of products and reactants in electrochemical cells. The dynamics of these systems are dependent on the balance of viscous and capillary forces. In turn, these forces depend on the properties of the fluids as well as the material composition and morphology of the porous structure. This seminar will present a direct numerical modelling approach that can be applied to interrogate these competing effects and analyse the resulting transport phenomena.

The seminar will start with an overview of the multiphase Lattice Boltzmann Model developed and implemented in the open-source code, TCLB (tclb.io) before discussing its application to in two different fields. The first is related to a phenomena known as flooding in gas diffusion electrodes and presents the preliminary work being conducted to understand how these devices fail and what can be done to improve their robustness. The second application involves the study of relative permeability in rough fractures and understanding how uncertainty associated with a statistical description of these geometries influences transport properties such as relative permeability.