Octree Optimized Micrometric Fibrous Microstructure Generation for Domain Reconstruction and Flow Simulation

Entropy (Basel). 2021 Sep 2;23(9):1156. doi: 10.3390/e23091156.

Abstract

Over recent decades, tremendous advances in the field of scalable numerical tools and mesh immersion techniques have been achieved to improve numerical efficiency while preserving a good quality of the obtained results. In this context, an octree-optimized microstructure generation and domain reconstruction with adaptative meshing is presented and illustrated through a flow simulation example applied to permeability computation of micrometric fibrous materials. Thanks to the octree implementation, the numerous distance calculations in these processes are decreased, thus the computational complexity is reduced. Using the parallel environment of the ICI-tech library as a mesher and a solver, a large scale case study is performed. The study is applied to the computation of the full permeability tensor of a three-dimensional microstructure containing 10,000 fibers. The considered flow is a Stokes flow and it is solved with a stabilized finite element formulation and a monolithic approach.

Keywords: domain reconstruction; flow simulation; microstructure generation; octree optimization; permeability computing.