Numerical investigation of fluid flow behavior in steel cord with lattice Boltzmann methodology: The impacts of microstructure and loading force

Abstract

Steel cord materials were found to have internal porous microstructures and complex fluid flow properties. However, current studies have rarely reported the transport behavior of steel cord materials from a microscopic viewpoint. The computed tomography (CT) scanning technology and lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) were used in this study to reconstruct and compare the real three-dimensional (3D) pore structures and fluid flow in the original and tensile (by loading 800 N force) steel cord samples. The pore-scale LBM results showed that fluid velocities increased as displacement differential pressure increased in both the original and tensile steel cord samples, but with two different critical values of 3.3273 Pa and 2.6122 Pa, respectively. The original steel cord sample had higher maximal and average seepage velocities at the 1/2 sections of 3D construction images than the tensile steel cord sample. These phenomena should be attributed to the fact that when the original steel cord sample was stretched, its porosity decreased, pore radius increased, flow channel connectivity improved, and thus flow velocity increased. Moreover, when the internal porosity of tensile steel cord sample was increased by 1 time, lead the maximum velocity to increase by 1.52 times, and the average velocity was increased by 1.66 times. Furthermore, when the density range was determined to be 0–38, the pore phase showed the best consistency with the segmentation area. Depending on the Zou-He Boundary and Regularized Boundary, the relative error of simulated average velocities was only 0.2602 percent.