The Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is a direct numerical simulation approach that approximates the Navier-Stokes equations at the mesoscopic scale. Therefore, LBM handles fluid-solid interaction at the boundaries quite efficiently on a regular grid. Coupled with the discrete element method that solves the equation of motion for the particles, the method is well suited to study fluid in porous media (e.g., sand, rock and other granular materials). Incorporating another fluid or gas phase into this high-fidelity LBM-DEM model is trivial with the so-called Shan-Chen model.
The data shared here is a sample of numerical data generated from the LBM-DEM simulation of water-air mixture in the soil (i.e., unsaturated soil). The model is implemented using the code LB3D, developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Helmholtz-Institut Erlangen–Nürnberg for Renewable Energy, Nürnberg, Germany. What you will find in this shared dataset is the steady-state phase field that separate the water and air in the pore space. The complete evolution of the phase fields are not shared since it can be easily several TBs. Visualization of this dataset can be done with Paraview or any other post-processing tools that can handle HDF5 files.
This dataset is a sample of the preliminary result of the PhD work of Sherrin Joseph, as a demonstration of the open-science activities in the Chair of Soil Micro Mechanics of the University of Twente.
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