Lattice Boltzmann Method for pore-scale multi-phase flow simulation in Underground Porous Media: a review

The study of fluid flow in porous media is relevant in various applications from chemical to environmental and geoenergy engineering. Understanding and properly simulating multi-phase flow phenomena at both micro and macro scales is fundamental in particular in the view of underground storage of fluids like methane, hydrogen, and CO2. This work aims at resuming the idea behind the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) for modeling multi-phase flows through underground porous media, aiming at highlighting the advantages, and the possible approaches for single-phase and multi-phase flow. Moreover, an algorithmic analysis is given in single-phase and compared to more popular multi-phase Lattice Boltzmann models proposed and their main computing strategies. Direct numerical simulation (DNS) of flow in porous structures has become popular in recent years due to the novel high-performance computing architectures, which involve many cores or threads in calculation. This work concludes with an overview of the most common open-source codes available online to approach porous media flow simulation in this context and emphasize the most common for HPC applications.