Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in Porous Media Systems

Fluid flow and heat transfer in porous media encompass the movement of fluids through interwoven solid matrices and the accompanying transport of thermal energy. At the pore scale, fluid dynamics are governed by viscous drag, inertial effects and buoyancy, while heat may be carried by convection within the fluid and conduction through the solid skeleton. Macroscopic descriptions often invoke Darcy’s law for slow flows or its extensions, such as the Brinkman equation, to account for viscous shear near boundaries. Effective properties—permeability, porosity and thermal conductivity—emerge from the underlying microstructure and dictate system behaviour. Multiscale approaches, ranging from direct numerical simulation at the pore scale to homogenised continuum models, are vital for capturing complex interactions between free fluid regions and porous domains. Applications span groundwater remediation, oil recovery, geothermal energy, chemical reactors and thermal management in engineered foams. Recent advances have improved predictive capability by coupling pore-scale detail with continuum descriptions, by incorporating anisotropy of pore networks and by integrating local thermal nonequilibrium conditions. The interplay of structural parameters with flow regime and thermal gradients determines transport efficiency and underpins the design of high-performance porous devices for energy conversion, environmental protection and industrial catalysis.

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Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in Porous Media Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in fluid flow and heat transfer in porous media systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Porosity: Fraction of void space in a porous medium available for fluid flow.

Permeability: Measure of a material’s ability to transmit fluids under a pressure gradient.

Brinkman equation: Extension of Darcy’s law incorporating viscous shear to model flow near solid boundaries.

Reynolds number (Re): Dimensionless ratio of inertial to viscous forces in a flowing fluid.

Nusselt number (Nu): Dimensionless measure of convective heat transfer relative to conduction across a boundary layer.

References

1. Heat transport regimes in structured reactors: CFD analysis and influence of reactor diameter and length. Results in Engineering (2024).
2. Numerical simulation of the nanofluid flow and heat transfer in porous microchannels with different flow path arrangements using single-phase and two-phase models. International Journal of Thermofluids (2024).
3. A new numerical mesoscopic scale one-domain approach solver for free fluid/porous medium interaction. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering (2024).