Heat and Mass Transfer in Porous Media

In this article we use the method of volume averaging to derive the governing equations for heat and mass transport in a rigid porous medium. These equations involve spatial derivations of the temperature and concentration and suitable representations of these deviations are required in order to obtain a closure. In our approach, the closure is based on the governing differential equations for the spatial deviations and it allows for the direct determination of the transport coefficients that appear in the volume-averaged equations. These calculated coefficients are compared with experimental measurements for the following cases: diffusion and reaction in porous media, heat conduction in two-phase systems, dispersion of a non-adsorbing solute and thermal dispersion in a packed bed. For conductive and diffusive transport, excellent agreement between theory and experiment is found using the spatially periodic model of a porous medium. The comparison between theory and experiment for convective processes indicates that the details of the structure of a real porous medium are important and not adequately described by the spatially periodic models used in this study.

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