This thesis consists of work mainly performed within the Qatar Carbonates
and Carbon Storage Research Centre (QCCSRC) project, focusing on
the prediction of flow and transport properties in porous media. The direct
pore scale simulation of complex fluid flow on reservoir rocks is the
main topic of this work. A simulation package based on the lattice Boltzmann
method has been developed to study single and multiphase flow as
well as thermal and solute dispersion in porous media. The simulator has
been extensively validated by comparing simulation results to reference solutions. Various numerical experiments have been performed to study the
single/multiphase/solute dispersion flow in reservoir rocks. The simulator
successfully predicts various transport properties including single phase and
relative permeability, capillary pressure, initial-residual saturation, residual
cluster size distribution and dispersion coefficient. The prediction has been
compared to available experimental data and was generally found to be in
good agreement. The simulator is also ready for exploring the two-phase
dynamic problem with coupled and nonlinear physical processes including
the effect of wettability, surface tension and hysteresis.
To improve the efficiency of the lattice Boltzmann simulations, an optimised
collision model and corresponding parallel operation are proposed and
implemented. A sparse storage scheme which significantly reduces the memory requirement has been designed and implemented for complex porous media. Due to the application of these optimisation schemes, it is possible to perform simulations on large scale samples (Size >1024x512x512). The optimised code shows very good and promising performance, and nearly ideal scalability was achieved.