NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS OF NON-NEWTONIAN FLUID FLOW THROUGH STRUCTURED POROUS MEDIA

Abstract

Numerical analysis of the mechanisms that govern the flow in a porous region is crucial for modeling porous media flows. This study describes an adapted and efficient turbulence modeling technique for this category of porous media flows. The main objective of the present study is to provide a detailed pore scale description of non-Newtonian fluid flow and to analyze the formation of coherent structures in the wake region close to the solid wall subject to the effects of fine-scale turbulence. The computations were performed in a two dimensional representative computational domain of a porous matrix, which comprised a periodic array of circular cylinders. The flow-modeling strategy was employed is the steady Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) approach. In the RANS modeling framework, standard k–ε turbulence model was used. The porosity ( φ) of the porous computational area and Reynolds number ( ReD ) varied from 0.3 to 0.8 and 100 to 40,000, respectively with the variation of flow behavior index (n) from 0.3 to 0.9.