Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Thermal dispersion in convective flow in porous media has been numerically investigated using a two-dimensional periodic model of porous structure. A macroscopically uniform flow is assumed to pass through a collection of square rods placed regularly in an infinite space, where a macroscopically linear temperature gradient is imposed perpendicularly to the flow direction. Due to the periodicity of the model, only one structural unit is taken for a calculation domain to resolve an entire domain of porous medium. Continuity, Navier–Stokes and energy equations are solved numerically to describe the microscopic velocity and temperature fields at a pore scale. The numerical results thus obtained are integrated over a unit structure to evaluate the thermal dispersion and the molecular diffusion due to tortuosity. The resulting correlation for a high-Peclet-number range agrees well with available experimental data.
Kuwahara et al. (Thu,) studied this question.