5. Conclusion

Although heat transfer with phase change in porous media is still the subject of a great deal of research work, with increasingly complex or new problems being considered (media with very low or high permeability, coupled transfers, nanothermics, etc.), engineers have at their disposal a body of knowledge (results and models) and experimental and numerical tools enabling satisfactory predictions to be made for a large number of problems. From both theoretical and experimental points of view, however, the use of this knowledge is still often hampered not only by difficulties in determining actual transfer properties, but also by difficulties associated with the local measurement of a large number of variables. Progress in characterization tools (tomography, etc.) and numerical computation (high-performance computing) points to significant future advances.

Finally,...