An Experimental Investigation and Simulation of Flow through Porous Media Perpendicular to Bedding Plane Gupta Priyank, Alam Javed, Muzzammil Mohd. Department of Civil Engineering, Aligarh Muslim University, India Online published on 11 December, 2019. Abstract Permeability(k) is an essential property of soil and has its importance in various fields of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering. It is the ease with which water can percolate through the interconnected voids in a soil mass. Fluid flow through permeable soil for single layer soil system normal to bedding plane is presented in this paper. To find out permeability in the laboratory, experimentation is required. It is not always possible to carry out experiments for a large number of stratified soil layers, or it may seem to be a time-consuming affair. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) proves to be an excellent alternative to carry out such analysis without much effort. In the present study, a 3-D CFD analysis using ANSYS Fluent 14 software, has been performed to predict the permeability of different soil masses. The analysis shows that the permeability of various soil masses determined experimentally is found to be almost the same as that obtained from CFD analysis. Experimental as well as a numerical study was carried out to determine permeability and pressure drop variation for five soil types namely gravel, coarse sand, fine sand, fly ash and silt, and a formulation was proposed to calculate viscous resistance factor experimentally which was validated through simulation results. The permeable soil layer was modelled as porous media obeying Forchheimer's law. A porosity of 40%, which is generally achievable in most of the granular soils is considered in the experimental study. Simulated permeability was determined based on pressure drop along the length of porous soil, which was obtained using ANSYS Fluent 14 software and compared for various soil materials. The error between experimental and simulated values of permeability was also shown, a significantly minimal error was observed, which validates the experimental work. The maximum percentage error obtained during the present study is 2.21% between observed and simulated permeability, which justifies the performance accuracy of CFD analysis and proves it to be a good alternative of laboratory permeability measurements. Top Keywords Permeability, Porosity, Darcy's law, Forchheimer's equation, ANSYS Fluent 14. Top |