Multiphase Flow in a Hele-Shaw Cell

The primary goal of this thesis is to explore the capabilities of MOOSE (Multiphysics

Object Oriented Simulation Environment) and LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular

Massively Parallel Simulator) and their potential to be coupled in order to simulate

multiphase flow in a Hele-Shaw cell. After formulating the Darcy-Richards multi-

phase flow equations for a finite element method application, I synthesized the nec-

essary particle-particle interactions from existing literature and implemented them

in LAMMPS. In addition, I created a parallelized C++ program to calculate the

particle packing field through the heavy employ of OpenMP. With the conclusion

of extensive testing suites for both LAMMPS and MOOSE, I developed a python

program which was used to mesh LAMMPS and MOOSE by acting as a translation

and book-keeping program. While the coupling scheme appears to function properly

in test cases, it fails to capture the full impact of the particles on the fluid system and

thus allows for penetration of the invading fluid into regions which ought to remain

unsaturated.