| Multiphase flow is an important transport process that is found in many natural phenomena and engineering applications. In petroleum engineering, sub-surface multiphase flow takes place throughout the primary, secondary, and tertiary stages of recovery. Advances in high-performance computing and experimental techniques now allow us to study multiphase flow at the pore level to better understand pore-scale dynamic and its continuum-level descriptions. In this work, a parallelized multiphase flow simulator is developed using the lattice Boltzmann method with the color-gradient multiphase model. Several boundary conditions for the multiphase flow model are developed, and they allow the simulator to handle a range of practically relevant multiphase flows that are pressure-driven, rate-driven, or gravity-driven. The simulator is parallelized, which is critical for simulating flows in computational domains of meaningful sizes. The parallel performance is good in large computation domains. Validation tests show that the simulator is able to generate controlled interfacial tension, wettability and can accurately simulate dynamic problems. As an application, we simulated pressure-driven displacements in a porous medium made up by packed spheres using fluids with different viscosity ratios and wettability at different capillary numbers. Our results are consistent with published numerical and experimental results. |
