A study of multiphase flow in fractured porous media using a microscale lattice Boltzmann approach

The lattice Boltzmann technique has been shown to be an efficient and reliable approach to modeling single- and multi-fluid flow in porous media systems. The flexibility of this approach in discretizing the pore/solid space means it is particularly well suited to capturing fluid behavior, fluid-fluid interactions, and fluid-solid interactions at the scale of the individual pores. Such flexibility readily lends itself to studying processes occurring at physical interfaces, such as between a fracture and the surrounding porous matrix. Here we present pore-level simulations of fluid flow through a fracture embedded in an unsaturated matrix. Simulations are run on the massively parallel Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) using the two-fluid, two-dimensional lattice Boltzmann flow simulator developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. We look at the effect of pressure gradients and initial matrix saturation on infiltration into the matrix and fluid flow along the fracture.