Equivalence between volume averaging and moments matching techniques for mass transport models in porous media.

This paper deals with local non-equilibrium models for mass transport in dual-phase and dual-region porous media. The first contribution of this study is to formally prove that the time-asymptotic moments matching method applied to two-equation models is equivalent to a fundamental deterministic perturbation decomposition proposed in Quintard et al. (2001) [1] for mass transport and in Moyne et al. (2000) [2] for heat transfer. Both theories lead to the same one-equation local non-equilibrium model. It has very broad practical and theoretical implications because (1) these models are widely employed in hydrology and chemical engineering and (2) it indicates that the concepts of volume averaging with closure and of matching spatial moments are equivalent in the one-equation non-equilibrium case. This work also aims to clarify the approximations that are made during the upscaling process by establishing the domains of validity of each model, for the mobile–immobile situation, using both a fundamental analysis and numerical simulations. In particular, it is demonstrated, once again, that the local mass equilibrium assumptions must be used very carefully

Technical Notes on Volume Averaging in Porous Media I: How to Choose a Spatial Averaging Operator for Periodic and Quasiperiodic Structures.

This paper is a first of a series aiming at revisiting technical aspects of the volume averaging theory. Here, we discuss the choice of the spatial averaging operator for periodic and quasiperiodic structures. We show that spatial averaging must be defined in terms of a convolution and analyze the properties of a variety of kernels, with a particular focus on the smoothness of average fields, the ability to attenuate geometrical fluctuations, Taylor series expansions, averaging of periodic fields and resilience to perturbations of periodicity. We conclude with a set of recommendations regarding kernels to use in the volume averaging theory

Intriguing viscosity effects in confined suspensions: a numerical study

The effective viscosity of dilute and semi-dilute suspensions in a shear flow in a microfluidic configuration is studied numerically. The suspension is composed of monodisperse and non-Brownian hard spherical buoyant particles confined between two walls in a shear flow. An abrupt change of the viscosity behaviour occurs with strong confinements: when the wall-to-wall distance is below five times the radius of the particles, we obtain a change of the sign of the contribution of the hydrodynamic interactions to the effective viscosity. This effect is the macroscopic counterpart of the peculiar micro-hydrodynamics of confined suspensions due to the influence of walls. In addition, for higher concentrations (above 25%), we find that the viscosity meets a minimum when the inter-wall distance is around five times the sphere radius. This phenomenon is reminiscent of the Fahraeus-Lindqvist effect for blood confined in small capillaries. However, we show that for sheared confined semi-dilute suspensions, the physical origin of this minimum is not due to a migration effect but to the change of hydrodynamic interactions

Heat Transfer in Porous Media: Second-Order Closure and Nonlinear Source Terms

Heat transfer in multiscale materials is ubiquitous in natural and engineered systems. These materials are often modeled at a macroscopic scale, where microscopic details are filtered out to reduce numerical and physical complexity. Here, we use the method of volume averaging to upscale heat transfer equations for a saturated porous medium with non-linear bulk and surface sources. This approach leads to the development of a variety of macroscopic models, including a two-temperature model with a second order closure that extends previous results from Quintard and Whitaker [2000]. Effective properties are calculated for model unit-cells (1D, 2D and 3D) and also for a realistic pore-scale geometry obtained using X-ray tomography. The model further features a distribution coefficient that indicates the distribution of the surface heat between the two phases at the macroscale. By comparing computational results for the two-temperature model against direct numerical simulations, we show that this effective distribution coefficient captures well the partitioning of heat, even in the transient regime

Modeling non-equilibrium mass transport in biologically reactive porous media.

We develop a one-equation non-equilibrium model to describe the Darcy-scale transport of a solute undergoing biodegradation in porous media. Most of the mathematical models that describe the macroscale transport in such systems have been developed intuitively on the basis of simple conceptual schemes. There are two problems with such a heuristic analysis. First, it is unclear how much information these models are able to capture; that is, it is not clear what the model's domain of validity is. Second, there is no obvious connection between the macroscale effective parameters and the microscopic processes and parameters. As an alternative, a number of upscaling techniques have been developed to derive the appropriate macroscale equations that are used to describe mass transport and reactions in multiphase media. These approaches have been adapted to the problem of biodegradation in porous media with biofilms, but most of the work has focused on systems that are restricted to small concentration gradients at the microscale. This assumption, referred to as the local mass equilibrium approximation, generally has constraints that are overly restrictive. In this article, we devise a model that does not require the assumption of local mass equilibrium to be valid. In this approach, one instead requires only that, at sufficiently long times, anomalous behaviors of the third and higher spatial moments can be neglected; this, in turn, implies that the macroscopic model is well represented by a convection–dispersion–reaction type equation. This strategy is very much in the spirit of the developments for Taylor dispersion presented by Aris (1956). On the basis of our numerical results, we carefully describe the domain of validity of the model and show that the time-asymptotic constraint may be adhered to even for systems that are not at local mass equilibrium

Multiple-scale analysis of transport phenomena in porous media with biofilms

This dissertation examines transport phenomena within porous media colonized by biofilms. These sessile communities of microbes can develop within subsurface soils or rocks, or the riverine hyporheic zone and can induce substantial modification to mass and momentum transport dynamics. Biofilms also extensively alter the chemical speciation within freshwater ecosystems, leading to the biodegradation of many pollutants. Consequently, such systems have received a considerable amount of attention from the ecological engineering point of view. Yet, research has been severely limited by our incapacity to (1) directly observe the microorganisms within real opaque porous structures and (2) assess for the complex multiple-scale behavior of the phenomena. This thesis presents theoretical and experimental breakthroughs that can be used to overcome these two difficulties. An innovative strategy, based on X-ray computed microtomography, is devised to obtain three-dimensional images of the spatial distribution of biofilms within porous structures. This topological information can be used to study the response of the biological entity to various physical, chemical and biological parameters at the pore-scale. In addition, these images are obtained from relatively large volumes and, hence, can also be used to determine the influence of biofilms on the solute transport on a larger scale. For this purpose, the boundary-value-problems that describe the pore-scale mass transport are volume averaged to obtain homogenized Darcy-scale equations. Various models, along with their domains of validity, are presented in the cases of passive and reactive transport. This thesis uses the volume averaging technique, in conjunction with spatial moments analyses, to provide a comprehensive macrotransport theory as well as a thorough study of the relationship between the different models, especially between the two-equation and one-equation models. A non-standard average plus perturbation decomposition is also presented to obtain a one-equation model in the case of multiphasic transport with linear reaction rates. Eventually, the connection between the three-dimensional images and the theoretical multiple-scale analysis is established. This thesis also briefly illustrates how the permeability can be calculated numerically by solving the so-called closure problems from the three-dimensional X-ray images

A macroscopic model for the description of two-phase flow in structured packings using the concept of effective surface

Columns containing structured packings play an important role in chemical engineering processes involving distillation and gas-liquid separation, such as air distillation or CO2 absorption. The packings often consist of corrugated plates that significantly increase the exchange surface between gas and liquid phases in the column. The columns are generally operated in a counter-current flow mode: a thin liquid film is driven by gravity and is sheared by the upward gas flow. The structure of the packings may be seen as a porous medium with a large porosity and multi-scale features, with a locally repeating elementary pattern. A pore-scale, associated to the elementary pattern, and a macro-scale assimilated to the packing scale, define the two-scale description. An upscaling approach was used previously to develop a macro-scale law for the gas-phase flow at relatively large Reynolds numbers [?]. At this scale the flow is governed by averaged equations, and information concerning the dynamic of the phase as well as its interactions with the solid structure are embedded in effective parameters. In this model, it was assumed, as a first approximation, that the liquid film is sufficiently thin so that its impact on the flow and the average gas pressure drop can be neglected. In this work, we propose to analyze the potential effect of the film wave instabilities on the macroscale flow and pressure drop

Modeling two-phase flow of immiscible fluids in porous media: Buckley-Leverett theory with explicit coupling terms

Continuum models that describe two-phase flow of immiscible fluids in porous media often treat momentum exchange between the two phases by simply generalizing the single-phase Darcy law and introducing saturation-dependent permeabilities. Here we study models of creeping flows that include an explicit coupling between both phases via the addition of cross terms in the generalized Darcy law. Using an extension of the Buckley-Leverett theory, we analyze the impact of these cross terms on saturation profiles and pressure drops for different couples of fluids and closure relations of the effective parameters. We show that these cross terms in the macroscale models may significantly impact the flow compared to results obtained with the generalized Darcy laws without cross terms. Analytical solutions, validated against experimental data, suggest that the effect of this coupling on the dynamics of saturation fronts and the steady-state profiles is very sensitive to gravitational effects, the ratio of viscosity between the two phases, and the permeability. Our results indicate that the effects of momentum exchange on two-phase flow may increase with the permeability of the porous medium when the influence of the fluid-fluid interfaces become similar to that of the solid-fluid interfaces

Modeling flow in porous media with rough surfaces: effective slip boundary conditions and application to structured packings

Abstract Understanding and modeling flows in columns equipped with structured packings is crucial to enhance the efficiency of many processes in chemical engineering. As in most porous media, an important factor that affects the flow is the presence of rough surfaces, whether this roughness has been engineered as a texture on the corrugated sheets or is the result of hydrodynamic instabilities at the interface between a gas and a liquid phase. Here, we develop a homogenized model for flows in generic porous media with rough surfaces. First, we derive a tensorial form of an effective slip boundary condition that replaces the no-slip condition on the complex rough structure and captures surface anisotropy. Second, a Darcy-Forchheimer model is obtained using the volume averaging method to homogenize the pore-scale equations with the effective slip condition. The advantage of decomposing the upscaling in these two steps is that the effective parameters at the Darcy-scale can be calculated in a representative volume with smooth boundaries, therefore considerably simplifying mesh construction and computations. The approach is then applied to a variety of geometries, including structured packings, and compared with direct numerical solutions of the flow to evaluate its accuracy over a wide range of Reynolds number. We find that the roughness can significantly impact the flow and that this impact is accurately captured by the effective boundary condition for moderate Reynolds numbers. We further discuss the dependance of the permeability and generalized Forchheimer terms upon the Reynolds number and propose a classification into distinct regimes

Validity of the Cauchy-Born rule applied to discrete cellular-scale models of biological tissues.

The development of new models of biological tissues that consider cells in a discrete manner is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to continuum methods based on partial differential equations, although formal relationships between the discrete and continuum frameworks remain to be established. For crystal mechanics, the discrete-to-continuum bridge is often made by assuming that local atom displacements can be mapped homogeneously from the mesoscale deformation gradient, an assumption known as the Cauchy-Born rule (CBR). Although the CBR does not hold exactly for noncrystalline materials, it may still be used as a first-order approximation for analytic calculations of effective stresses or strain energies. In this work, our goal is to investigate numerically the applicability of the CBR to two-dimensional cellular-scale models by assessing the mechanical behavior of model biological tissues, including crystalline (honeycomb) and noncrystalline reference states. The numerical procedure involves applying an affine deformation to the boundary cells and computing the quasistatic position of internal cells. The position of internal cells is then compared with the prediction of the CBR and an average deviation is calculated in the strain domain. For center-based cell models, we show that the CBR holds exactly when the deformation gradient is relatively small and the reference stress-free configuration is defined by a honeycomb lattice. We show further that the CBR may be used approximately when the reference state is perturbed from the honeycomb configuration. By contrast, for vertex-based cell models, a similar analysis reveals that the CBR does not provide a good representation of the tissue mechanics, even when the reference configuration is defined by a honeycomb lattice. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for concurrent discrete and continuous modeling, adaptation of atom-to-continuum techniques to biological tissues, and model classification