Abstract
An accurate velocity model for porous flow plays an important role in the prediction of the ground water pollution. However,there is little information about the pore fluid velocity distribution. We here focus on the pore fluid velocity distribution observed in mesoscale of a porous media composed of many irregular shaped grains. The reason is that complicated ground water pollution found in a field scale is affected by the pore fluid velocity distribution measured in the mesoscale. The Lattice Boltzmann simulator, which works on a graphics processing unit(GPU), was employed to evaluate the pore fluid velocity distribution in an accurate three dimensional digital model involving Toyoura sand and then we performed a series of porous flow simulation. The pore fluid velocity distributions obtained from the simulations are in good agreement with those measured by visualization experiments. These velocity distributions converge into a unique non-gaussian distribution under various Reynolds numbers ranging from 2 to 10.
