Numerical simulation of flow in porous media using the SPH method and Ergun force

This work presents the implementation of the Ergun force term on the DualSPHysics code, to simulate flow in porous media using a representative element volume (REV). In the study of microscopic seepage and fluid-solid interactions, a typical approach is a pore-scale simulation due to its precision; however, it involves a high computation cost, making it more suitable to adopt the REV scale. Here are presented nine simulations comparing the velocity, at the outlet of the system, obtained by a pore-scale geometry and the Ergun force term and REV simulations using SPH. The results have a good fit between the pore-scale simulations and the Ergun force term simulations, where the lowest and highest errors are 2.92x10-3 and 1.43x10-2, respectively. These results present novel and alternative simulations in the study of the flow in porous media using the SPH method where the pore-scale geometry is usually used.