Graphical Analysis of Fluid Flow Through Polymeric Complex Structures Using Multi-scale Simulations - Selected Topics of Computational and Experimental Fluid Mechanics - page 282

with great detail and the flow through these micro-porous structures was analyzed
in order to understand microvascular turbulent fluid flow. Detailed visualization in
real time could be used not only to help in the study of different systems but also
to obtain amazing images that would be impossible to achieve by other techniques,
here we present some of this beautiful pictures.

1 Introduction

Today, scientific and information visualization is a fundamental research area with
applications in the industry, medicine, design of new materials an environmental
analysis. Advances in this area involve new branches of computer graphics and the
use and development of interfaces designed in such a way to permit, in an efficient and
attractive way, the analysis of the results obtained in different numerical calculations.
The aim is to improve the presentation and facilitate the analysis in a perceptibleman-
ner. As a good example we can mention the medical imaging which offers a broad
field for scientific visualization, where it is important to enhance imaging results
graphically in real time. Also, programs capable to present interactive molecular
models with applications in biology, chemistry and physics are fundamental in the
new era of applied science. Simulations of fluid flow through porous, meso-porous
media and micro-channels also require extensive computational resources and visu-
alization in order to get good performance. The numerical simulation of this kind of
processes must be able to model in a satisfactory way sophisticated information, con-
cerning the porous medium structure as, for example, complex structures in real solid
materials, existence of fractures, mobile interphases or unstable boundaries as found
in geo and biochemical processes. In this work, we present some pictures obtained
during the visual study of polymeric fluid flow simulations through different porous
media using multi-scale simulation via the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)
and the Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) methodologies.

2 Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Dissipative
Particle Dynamics

2.1 Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

The numerical method that we employ to solve the hydrodynamic equations is the
Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method, which is a Lagrangian method
used for solving the equations governing fluid motion. It is based on an interpo-
lation scheme (Monaghan 1982 , 1992 , 2005 ; Benz 1990 ; Liu and Liu 2003 ). A
fieldfunction A

i = 1 A

( r , t ) is approximated by A ( r , t ) ≈ ( r i , t ) W ( r − r i )ʔ V i ,