When Porous Media Meets Turbulence

Scientific image of an instantaneous flow field inside synthetic porous media via DNS.
Image: Chu et al., 2018

Porous media are everywhere. When Reynolds numbers in pores are large, the unsteady inertial effects become important giving rise to the onset of turbulence, for instance in packed bed catalysis, gas turbine cooling, and pebble-bed high-temperature nuclear reactors. Access to detailed flow measurements is very challenging due to the inherent space constraints of the porous media. Therefore, a research group of the Institute of Aerospace Thermodynamics (ITLR) at University of Stuttgart uses high-fidelity direct numerical simulation (DNS) to investigate the physics of fluids inside porous media which serves for industrial 3D-printed porous media design.

Read the complete user research report at the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing.

Principal Investigators

Xu Chu, Bernhard Weigand

Institut für Thermodynamik der Luft- und Raumfahrt, Universität Stuttgart