Research Projects

Flow and transport through porous media are essential in various engineering applications, including oil extraction, chromatography separation, geological carbon sequestration, contaminant transport, drug delivery, and nutrient transport in biological tissues. Understanding the link between microstructure and macroscale flow and transport is a major challenge in this field. The mathematical framework of homogenisation theory can be used for microstructures, but porescale simulation of flow and transport in porous media is poorly understood. Previous numerical works in this field have used lower order accurate schemes, which are not closer to the actual physical phenomena due to inherent implicit numerical diffusion and dispersion. The application of the High Order Compact (HOC) scheme could help achieve high accuracy with low computational cost. The proposed project aims to bring unexplored facets to this field, combining the PI's expertise in HOC methods with the Co-PI's expertise in transport phenomena in porous media. There is currently no active research in India in this direction, but the proposed objectives could attract young researchers to improve computational aspects of these phenomena. Internationally, researchers at Oxford, Manchester, and Nottingham are working on methods of multiple scales to model low Reynolds number flows. This proposed research will provide an opportunity to build a strong international research network by contributing to the computational aspects of understanding flow through narrow gaps such as porous media using HOC schemes.