Flow Through Porous Media

Overview

It would not very much be overstatement to say that everything in and around us is porous through which our world flows. The flow through porous media happens in countless number of applications ranging from geophysical flow, recovery of oil, gas, minerals from mother earth, transport and sequestration of contaminant in subsurface, to the large scale chemical processes involving catalyst, filter, adsorbent, and also modeling of physiological processes. Keeping this wide range of applications in mind, I will try to present a general overview of porous media flow, and introduce various theoretical tools to characterize and predict the flow.The course is meant for undergraduate students, pursuing degrees in various engineering disciplines, listed in the section above for intended audience. For few of these disciplines, “Flow through Porous Media” is considered a core course. For others, this subject is taught as part of other core courses with different name. This course will serve as a refresher course for PG students, who are engaged in research related to porous media flow.INTENDED AUDIENCE: Any engineering students/FacultyPREREQUISITES: Background in Fluid Mechanics or equivalent is preferredINDUSTRY SUPPORT: Chemical Process Industries, Oil & Gas Companies, Environmental Consulatants

Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction, permeability, porosity, various forms of characterizationsWeek 2: Darcy’s Law, mass continuity in Cartesian and cylindrical coordinates, pressure equations
Week 3: Reynold’s Number for porous media, Kozeny Carman, and Ergun Equation
Week 4: Transport mechanisms: bulk and surface diffusion, Knudsen Transport, Klinkenberg effect, slip flow Week 5: Immiscible displacement, two phase mass continuity, capillary pressureWeek 6: Conceptual models of relative permeability and saturation
Week 7: Progression of saturation front in two phase flow, Buckley Leverett theory
Week 8: Miscible displacement, diffusion in porous media, tracer test
Week 9: Introduction to Taylor Aris dispersion, dispersion regimesWeek 10: Migration and interception of fine particlesWeek 11: Introduction to flow through deformable porous media
Week 12: Applications, summary