Nanoflows through disordered media: A joint lattice Boltzmann and molecular dynamics investigation

Abstract

We investigate nanoflows through dilute disordered media by means of joint lattice Boltzmann (LB) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations -when the size of the obstacles is comparable to the size of the flowing particles-for randomly located spheres and for a correlated particle-gel. In both cases at sufficiently low solid fraction, Phi < 0.01, LB and MD provide similar values of the permeability. However, for Phi > 0.01, MD shows that molecular-size effects lead to a decrease of the permeability, as compared to the Navier-Stokes predictions. For gels, the simulations highlights a surplus of permeability, which can be accommodated within a rescaling of the effective radius of the gel monomers.