Boundary-fitted and voxelized meshes in rocks´ permeability simulations

This study analyzed the effect on absolute permeability determination by simulations using unstructured boundary-fitted meshes to describe the solid-fluid interface or voxelized meshes at the same resolution. We analyzed a 2D particle bed and a 3D domain from micro-CT images of a Berea sandstone sample. The results demonstrate that the interface smoothed meshes only gave better results than those for the voxelized meshes for refined meshes. For the usual low-resolution micro-CT images, it is not worthwhile to employ boundary-fitted meshes.