In this work we show the application of Sailfish to the study of fluid dynamics in porous media.
Sailfish is an open-source software based on the lattice-Boltzmann method. This application of
computational fluid dynamics is of particular interest to the oil and gas industry and the subject
could be a starting point for an undergraduate or graduate student in physics or engineering. We
built artificial samples of porous media with different porosities and used Sailfish to simulate the
fluid flow through them in order to calculate their permeability and tortuosity. We also present a
simple way to obtain the specific superficial area of porous media using Python libraries. To
contextualise these concepts, we analyse the applicability of the Kozeny–Carman equation, which is a
well-known permeability–porosity relation, to our artificial samples.