Robust pore-resolved CFD through porous monoliths reconstructed by micro-computed tomography: From digitization to flow prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Porous media are ubiquitous in energy storage and conversion, catalysis, biomechanics, hydrogeology, as well as many other fields. These materials possess high surface-to-volume ratios and their complex channels can restrict and guide the flow. However, optimizing design parameters for specific applications remains challenging due to the intricate structure of porous media. Pore-resolved CFD reveals the effects of their structure on flow characteristics, but is limited by the performance of mesh generation algorithms for such complex geometries. To alleviate this issue, we use a sharp immersed boundary method which enables usage of Cartesian, non-conformal grids, within a massively parallel finite element framework. This method preserves the order convergence of the scheme and allows for adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). We introduce a radial basis function-based representation of solids that allows to solve the flow through complex geometries with precision. We verify the method using the method of manufactured solutions. We validate it using pressure drop measurements through porous silicone monoliths digitized by X-ray computed microtomography, for pore Reynolds numbers up to 30. Simulations are conducted using grids of 200M cells distributed over 8k cores, which would require 16 times more cells without AMR. Results reveal that pore network structure is the principal factor describing pressure evolution and that preferential channels are dominant at this scale. In this work, we demonstrate a robust and efficient workflow for pore-resolved simulations of porous monoliths. This work bridges the gap between sub-millimetric flow and macroscopic properties, which will open the door to design and optimize processes through the usage of physics-based digital twins of complex porous media. • Sharp immersed boundary method using Radial Basis Functions (RBF) in parallel simulations ( > 8 k cores). • Fully pore-resolved flow through porous monoliths (pore size: 300 μ m , volume: 0.3 mL). • CFD through any mesh-defined solid using non-conformal grids in a finite element framework. • Efficient workflow from monolith digitization to resolved velocity and pressure fields. • Robust flow verification around arbitrary shapes using the method of manufactured solutions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".