Turbulence in TOUGH2
So I'm doing a bit of modelling on modelling high permeability faults and was getting some large fluxes of fluid (yay!) but....
I was wondering whether TOUGH2 is accurately representing these systems as I would assume that in contrast to laminar flow in fine grained porous media, flow in a permeable fault zone would be pretty turbulent.
I had a flick through the manual and this forum trying to find out a bit about how TOUGH2 works in this respect and what the limitations are but to no avail.
If anyone has any advice, thoughts or recommendations on where to look that would be great.
3 replies
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Hamish,
TOUGH2 is based on a multi-phase version of Darcy's law, which assumes laminar flow. However, both TOUGH+ and iTOUGH2 have some non-Darcy flow capabilities based on the Forchheimer equation (essentially a quadratic term that accounts for turbulence).
Hope this helps,
Stefan
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Hamish:
TOUGH+RealGasBrine (T+RGB - which can describe a system involving water, gases, salt and heat) has the capability to deal with turbulent flow using the Forchheimer equation. It all depends what kind of problem you are addressing and if it is suited to T+RGB. Your best best is iTOUGH2, which can do in a very general way.
George Moridis
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Thanks very much for the advice, will look into it!