Heat transfer in porous media

A porous medium is a complex-shaped solid containing cavities called pores. These cavities can communicate with each other and contain one or more fluid phases that can flow and, if necessary, exchange matter and/or energy with each other and/or with the solid. The solid part, also known as the porous matrix, may be deformable but must have a certain cohesion, which excludes from our definition fluidized beds made up of solid particles held in suspension under the effect of an interstitial fluid flow.

Numerous examples of porous media can be found in everyday life: textiles, leather, paper, fabrics, building materials, insulation, soil and rock formations, filters, heat exchanger coatings, dehydrated food and vegetables, biological fabrics, nuclear reactors, chemical engineering columns and more.

Porous media are extremely varied, in terms of structure (shape and size of matrix grains and pores, figure 1 ), nature (physico-chemical properties of constituent materials) and spatial scale (from tens of cubic kilometers for hydrocarbon deposits and groundwater to a few cubic millimeters for certain types of filter membrane), and play an important role in many industrial sectors and natural phenomena. Typical examples include: petroleum engineering, chemical engineering and electrochemistry, hydrogeology, geothermal engineering, thermal engineering, civil engineering, medicine, biochemistry, nuclear engineering...