SimTech

Flow and Fracture in Porous Media

Phenomena of flow and fracture are ubiquitous in science and engineering, and their appropriate understanding is indispensable for a wide field of applications. Computational visualization of flow problems looks back on a long and successful history. While in the beginning the focus was rather on steady-state solutions without additional quantities, the focus has shifted during the last decade to complex time-dependent problems involving a multitude of additional species and employing a wide range of concepts for their analysis. Although flow visualization is rather evolved, there are still subfields that have not yet been sufficiently addressed. One such example is the visualization of flow in porous media. While the weakly related visualization of blood flow in vessels is subject of current research, these works are not directly applicable to flow in porous media, as these typically neglect its multi-scale aspect. Visualization of fracture processes, on the other hand, is also a rather recent discipline that has not yet been studied thoroughly. So far, there exist mainly isolated works on the analysis of crack propagation.

This project aims at the development of new visualization techniques for multi-scale multiphysics simulation results of porous media within the scope of SimTech's PN 5. Due to the complex nature of the intertwined phenomena, development of appropriate visualization techniques is a mandatory component within PN 5. The aimed-at techniques will enable validation and progress during the development phase and provide means to harness the simulation results, in particular for practical-scale scenarios.

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