The cellular automata approach to simulating fluid flows in porous media

The modeling of fluid flows in porous media using cellular automata is discussed. Efficient methods for simulating these models on scalar, vector, and parallel computers are presented. Results for two-dimensional systems with up to 200 million particles show finite size effects. which may be interpreted as arising from the mean free path, λ, of the fluid particles. Empirically, these finite size effects are found to be proportional to: 1 + 7λ/R, where R is the characteristic size of the system. Using this information, the dependence of the permeability, κ, on the porosity, φ, of a 2D porous medium can be estimated as: καe6.5φ/(1 − φ).