Thermal Flows in Porous Media

Thermal flow in porous media is important in a wide range of areas, including oil recovery, geothermal development, the chemical and nuclear industries, civil engineering, energy storage and energy conversion. This monograph uses a systematic, rigorous and unified treatment to provide a general understanding of the phenomena involved. General equations for single- or multiphase flow (including an arbitrary number of components inside each phase), diffusion and chemical reactions are presented. The boundary conditions which may be imposed, the non-dimensional parameters, the structure of the solutions, the stability of finite amplitude solutions and many other related topics are also studied. Although the treatment is basically mathematical, specific physical problems are also dealt with. There are two major fields of application: natural convection and underground combustion. Both are discussed in detail. Various examples with exact or numerical solutions in the case of bounded or unbounded domains are presented, accompanied by extensive comment.