Welcome to the Lattice Boltzmann Research Group

As a result of a five-month collaboration, we provide an example of a simulation on underground fluid storage using OpenLB, an open-source lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) software. One of the main challenges in subsurface fluid dynamics is dealing with complex rock structures and high-density ratio differences. In our study, we simulate gas (red) (hydrogen, methane, and CO2) displacing water (blue) in a real rock micro-fluidic device to analyze how underground formations can be optimized for fluid storage.

Key parameters of the presented simulation:

• Hydrogen injection into water-filled porous media
• Density ratio: 7.1 kg/m³ (H2) vs. 992 kg/m³ (H2O)
• Device size: 2 cm x 1 cm
• Pressure drop: 120 Pa
• Contact angle: 30°
• Resolution: 8.3448e-06 m

Our LBM D2Q19 phase-field multi-phase model is based on the Allen-Cahn approach, allowing for accurate tracking of phase interfaces and capillary effects.

This research, developed at Politecnico di Torino within the iENTRANCE project and partially implemented at the KIT Institute in collaboration with the OpenLB team, provides valuable insights into hydrogen storage and geological sequestration. Special thanks to Mathias J. Krause, Tim Bingert, and Luiz Eduardo Czelusniak for their contributions to the implementation and development of this work.

The presentation will be held on April 10th at 9:00 AM during the OMC Med Energy 2025 conference in Ravenna.

Raeli, A. et al. (2025). OMC Med Energy 2025 Ravenna. In Press, 8-10 Apr 2025.

The developer team is very happy to announce the release of the next version of OpenLB. The updated open-source Lattice Boltzmann (LB) code is now available for download

This release contains a plethora of new models, features and usability improvements. The addition of a wall model for fixed and moving walls usable together with a new platform-transparent fluid structure interaction module, physically parameterized multi-phase models and examples and a completely revamped code generation pipeline deserve special mention. Preliminary support for grid refinement operators should also not be forgotten.

The new release is also available in a public Git repository together with all previous releases.

We encourage everyone to submit contributions as merge requests and report issues there.

Core development continues within the existing private repository which is available to consortium members.

In March, Dr. Stephan Simonis presented a talk at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) in Fort Worth, Texas, US.

His talk on "Exploratory Computation of Statistical Solutions to Incompressible Fluid Flows" marks the starting point of a recently funded project in the DAAD PRIME program in collaboration with CAMLab at ETH Zürich . Within this project, the integration of efficient uncertainty quantification methods in OpenLB will enable the computation of time-dependent statistical solutions to boundary value problems described by Navier-Stokes and Euler models for turbulent fluid flow in three dimensions.

The abstract of the talk is available here .

In the summer semester 2025, the LBRG will offer a Computational Fluid Dynamics and Simulation Lab. This interdisciplinary practical course focuses on applications of mathematics for simulations on high performance computers, e.g., for computational fluid dynamics. Within this context, the interlocking concepts of

• mathematical modeling
• numerical simulation (with lattice Boltzmann methods
• high performance computing
• presentation and evaluation of results

More information is given on the course page

Three members of LBRG presented talks at the 23rd IACM Computational Fluids Conference (CFC) in Santiago de Chile. Shota Ito presented recent work on the automatic generation of adjoint Lattice Boltzmann methods. Fedor Bukreev and Adrian Kummerländer presented their collaborative work on efficient wall-modelled fluid structure interaction. All three contributions relate directly to the FALCON project and represent the flexibility and performance of the open source LBM simulation framework OpenLB.