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The purpose of this paper is to obtain a permeability law of a gas flow through a permeable medium using particle image velocimetry experimental data as primal information, which is conflated with numerical calculations by means of a multi-scale method.

The D2Q9 single-relaxation-time Lattice Boltzmann model (LBM) implemented in GPU is used for the numerical calculations. In a first homogenized micro-scale, the drag forces are emulated by means of an effective Darcy law acting only in the close neighborhood of the solid structures. A second mesoscopic level of homogenization makes use of the effective drag forces resulting from the first-scale model.

The procedure is applied to an experiment consisting of a regular array of wires. For the first level of homogenization, an effective drag law of the individual elemental obstacles is produced by conflating particle image velocimetry measurements of the flow field around the wires and numerical calculations performed with a GPU implementation of the LBM. In the second homogenization, a Darcy–Forchheimer correlation is produced, which is used in a final homogenized LBM model.

The numerical simulations at the first level of homogenization require a substantial amount of calculations, which in the present case were performed by means of the computational power of a GPU.

The homogenization procedure can be extended to other permeable structures. The micro-scale-level model retrieves the fluid-structure forces between the flow and the obstacles, which are difficult to obtain experimentally either from direct measurement or by indirect assessment from velocity measurements.

This paper aims to assess the accuracy of Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for numerical simulation of the stratification of a Van der Waals (VdW) fluid subjected to a gravity field and non-uniform temperature distribution. A sensitivity analysis of the influence of the pseudopotential parameters and the grid resolution is presented. The effect of gravity force on interface densities, density profiles and liquid volume fraction is studied.

The D2Q9 multiple-relaxation-time pseudopotential LBM for two-phase flow is proposed to simulate the phase separation. The analytical solution for density profiles in a one-dimensional problem is derived and used as a benchmark case to validate the numerical results.

The numerical results reproduce the analytical density profiles with great accuracy over a wide range of simulation conditions, including variations of the gravity and temperature fields. Particularly, the numerical simulations are able to represent the effect of gravity on the existence and position of the liquid–vapor boundary of an ideal pure substance in thermodynamic equilibrium. The sensitivity of the results to variations of the calibration parameters of the VdW pseudopotential was assessed.

The numerical simulations were performed assuming a VdW fluid in a 2-D cavity with one periodic direction for which analytical solutions for benchmarking purposes are possible to obtain.

The following fundamental question is addressed: Is the pseudopotential LBM capable of simulating accurately the liquid–vapor equilibrium under gravity forces and temperature gradients? Moreover, regarding that the pseudopotential model requires the calibration of several internal parameters to achieve thermodynamic consistency, the sensitivity of the results to variations of these parameters is assessed.