The non-isothermal transport during flow in porous media is studied for
single- and dualscale porous media. A new combined experimental/numerical
approach to estimating the thermal dispersion tensor is introduced and
applied for both isotropic (single-scale) and anisotropic (dualscale) porous
media. The equivalence between the heat and mass transfer is exploited and a
1-D flow experimental setup is employed to study the spreading of a dye.
Later, the mathematical model for such a spreading of concentration
(equivalent to the temperature) around a point input in a constant velocity
field is solved using the finite element based code COMSOL. Thus obtained
numerical spreading pattern is fitted onto the experimentally observed one
using the dispersion matrix (tensor) as a fitting parameter. A few cases of
single- and dual-scale porous media are studied and the dispersion tensors
are reported for each individual case. In one case, the results are validated
with the available experimental data in the literature which shows a good
match
