A modified many-body dissipative particle dynamics model for mesoscopic fluid simulation: methodology, calibration, and application for hydrocarbon and water

ABSTRACT

The many-body dissipative particle dynamics (mDPD) is a prominent mesoscopic multiphase model for fluid transport in mesoconfinement. However, it has been a long-standing challenge for mDPD (and other multiphase-enabled DPD models) to accurately predict real-fluid static and dynamic properties simultaneously. We have developed a modified mDPD model to overcome the issue and a rigorous calibration approach that uses reference data, including experimental and/or molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to parameterise the modified mDPD for real fluids. We choose heptane as a representative example of hydrocarbon in source rocks to demonstrate the model's capability to accurately predict the equation of state (EOS), free surface tension, diffusivity, and viscosity. Our timing test shows that the modified mDPD is 400–500 times faster than its MD counterpart for simulating bulk heptane in equivalent volumes. To further demonstrate the robustness of the model, we revisited the benchmark problem of mesoscopic modelling of water, in which all the previous works on DPD reported only a limited portion of the water properties. We show that the modified mDPD can provide accurate modelling of water static and dynamic properties and an EOS that matches the experimental data to a large range of confinement pressure.

KEYWORDS:

• Coarse graining
• mesoscale
• hydrocarbon
• water
• equation of state

Acknowledgments

The research (Approved for public release (INL/JOU-20-57228)) is primarily supported by EFRC-MUSE, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award No. DE-SC0019285. The software development in this work is supported through the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) Program under the U.S. Department of Energy Idaho Operations Office Contract DE-AC07-05ID14517. The research used resources in the High Performance Computing Center at INL, which is supported by the Office of Nuclear Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Science User Facilities under Contract No. DE-AC07-05ID14517.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research (Approved for public release (INL/JOU-20-57228)) is primarily supported by EFRC-MUSE, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award No. DE-SC0019285. The software development in this work is supported through the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) Program under the U.S. Department of Energy Idaho Operations Office Contract DE-AC07-05ID14517. The research used resources in the High Performance Computing Center at INL, which is supported by the Office of Nuclear Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Science User Facilities under Contract No. DE-AC07-05ID14517.