Compaction effects on permeability of spherical packing
ISSN: 0264-4401
Article publication date: 7 May 2020
Issue publication date: 28 October 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of the permeability of spherical packing during cold compaction by pore-scale modeling.
Design/methodology/approach
The discrete element method (DEM) is used to generate spherical packing structure under different compressive pressures and the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is adopted to calculate the permeability of each spherical assembly.
Findings
It is found that the decrease of the porosity is the main reason of the reduction in permeability in the initial compression stage, but its influence becomes insufficient in the late compression stages. Besides, two empirical formulas are obtained, which describe the relation between the permeability and the equivalent mean diameter and the variation of normalized permeability with compressive pressure, respectively.
Research limitations/implications
In this study, the authors study the spherical particles and ignore the non-spherical effects. Besides, the classical contact model, the linear-spring-damping model, is used in DEM, so the plastic deformation cannot be considered.
Originality/value
The DEM and the LBM are well combined to study the compaction effects on permeability of spherical packing. Two simple expressions of the spherical packing structure with uniform diameter distribution are given for the first time.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work is financially supported by the NSF grant of China (No. U1837602, 11761131012).
Citation
Zhang, D., Tian, Z., Chen, Z., Wu, D., Zhou, G., Zhang, S. and Wang, M. (2020), "Compaction effects on permeability of spherical packing", Engineering Computations, Vol. 37 No. 9, pp. 3079-3096. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-01-2020-0015
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited