The effects of apparatus-induced dispersion on nonuniform, density-dependent flow in a cylindrical soil column were investigated using a finite-element model. To validate the model, the results with an analytical solution and laboratory column test data were analysed. The model simulations confirmed that flow nonuniformities induced by the apparatus are dissipated within the column when the distance to the apparatus outlet exceeds $3R/2$, where R represents the radius of the cylindrical column. Furthermore, the simulations revealed that convergent flow in the vicinity of the outlet introduces additional hydrodynamic dispersion in the soil column apparatus. However, this effect is minimal in the region where the column height exceeds $3R/2$. Additionally, it is found that an increase in the solution density gradient during the solute breakthrough period led to a decrease in flow velocity, which stabilized the flow and ultimately reduced dispersive mixing. Overall, this study provides insights into the behaviour of apparatus-induced dispersion in nonuniform, density-dependent flow within a cylindrical soil column, shedding light on the dynamics and mitigation of flow nonuniformities and dispersive mixing phenomena.

Understanding the generation of mechanical stress in drying, particle-laden films is important for a wide range of industrial processes. One way to study these stresses is through the cantilever experiment, whereby a thin film is deposited onto the surface of a thin plate that is clamped at one end to a wall. The stresses that are generated in the film during drying are transmitted to the plate and drive bending. Mathematical modelling enables the film stress to be inferred from measurements of the plate deflection. The aim of this paper is to present simplified models of the cantilever experiment that have been derived from the time-dependent equations of continuum mechanics using asymptotic methods. The film is described using nonlinear poroelasticity and the plate using nonlinear elasticity. In contrast to Stoney-like formulae, the simplified models account for films with non-uniform thickness and stress. The film model reduces to a single differential equation that can be solved independently of the plate equations. The plate model reduces to an extended form of the Föppl-von Kármán (FvK) equations that accounts for gradients in the longitudinal traction acting on the plate surface. Consistent boundary conditions for the FvK equations are derived by resolving the Saint-Venant boundary layers at the free edges of the plate. The asymptotically reduced models are in excellent agreement with finite element solutions of the full governing equations. As the Péclet number increases, the time evolution of the plate deflection changes from $t$ to $t^{1/2}$, in agreement with experiments.

Two boundary value problems are solved for potential steady-state 2D Darcian seepage flows towards a line sink in a homogeneous isotropic soil from a ponded land surface, which is not flat but profiled. The aim of this shaping is ‘uniformisation’ of the velocity and travel time between this surface and a horizontal drain modelled by a line sink. The complex potential domain is a half-strip, which is mapped onto a reference plane. Either the velocity magnitude or a vertical coordinate along the land surface are control variables. Either a complexified velocity or complex physical coordinate is reconstructed by solving mixed boundary-value problems with the help of the Keldysh-Sedov formula via singular integrals, the kernel of which are the control functions. The flow nets, isotachs and breakthrough curves are found by computer algebra routines. A designed soil hump above the drain ameliorates an unwanted ‘preferential flow’ (shortcut) and improves leaching of salinised soil of a cropfield during a pre-cultivation season.

Structural changes of the pore space and clogging phenomena are inherent to many porous media applications. However, related analytical investigations remain challenging due to potentially vanishing coefficients in the respective systems of partial differential equations. In this research, we apply an appropriate scaling of the unknowns and work with porosity-weighted function spaces. This enables us to prove existence, uniqueness and non-negativity of weak solutions to a combined flow and transport problem with vanishing, but prescribed porosity field, permeability and diffusion.

A spectral method is developed to study the steady and unsteady flow of fluid into a line sink from a horizontally confined aquifer, and the results are compared to solutions obtained implementing the finite element package COMSOLTM. The aquifer or drain is considered to be confined below so that the solutions are fundamentally unsteady. Comparison is made between the two methods in determining the drawdown of the surface.

The Wasserstein gradient flow structure of the partial differential equation system governing multiphase flows in porous media was recently highlighted in Cancès et al. [Anal. PDE10(8), 1845–1876]. The model can thus be approximated by means of the minimising movement (or JKO after Jordan, Kinderlehrer and Otto [SIAM J. Math. Anal.29(1), 1–17]) scheme that we solve thanks to the ALG2-JKO scheme proposed in Benamou et al. [ESAIM Proc. Surv.57, 1–17]. The numerical results are compared to a classical upstream mobility finite volume scheme, for which strong stability properties can be established.

An adaptive moving mesh finite difference method is presented to solve two types of equations with dynamic capillary pressure effect in porous media. One is the non-equilibrium Richards Equation and the other is the modified Buckley-Leverett equation. The governing equations are discretized with an adaptive moving mesh finite difference method in the space direction and an implicit-explicit method in the time direction. In order to obtain high quality meshes, an adaptive monitor function with directional control is applied to redistribute the mesh grid in every time step, then a diffusive mechanism is used to smooth the monitor function. The behaviors of the central difference flux, the standard local Lax-Friedrich flux and the local Lax-Friedrich flux with reconstruction are investigated by solving a 1D modified Buckley-Leverett equation. With the moving mesh technique, good mesh quality and high numerical accuracy are obtained. A collection of one-dimensional and two-dimensional numerical experiments is presented to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method.

The Buckley–Leverett partial differential equation has long been used to model two-phase flow in porous media. In recent years, the PDE has been modified to include a rate-dependent capillary pressure constitutive equation, known as dynamic capillary pressure. Previous traveling wave analysis of the modified Buckley–Leverett equation uncovered non-classical solutions involving undercompressive shocks. More recently, thermodynamically constrained averaging theory (TCAT) has generalized the capillary pressure equation by including additional dependence on fluid properties. In this paper, the model and traveling wave analysis are updated to incorporate TCAT capillary pressure as a generalization of dynamic capillary pressure. Solutions of the corresponding Riemann problem are similar to previous results except in the physically relevant situation in which both phases are pure fluids. The results presented here shed new light on the nature of the interface between one pure fluid displacing another pure fluid, in accordance with TCAT.

A nonconforming rectangular finite element method is proposed to solve a fluid structure interaction problem characterized by the Darcy-Stokes-Brinkman Equation with discontinuous coefficients across the interface of different structures. A uniformly stable mixed finite element together with Nitsche-type matching conditions that automatically adapt to the coupling of different sub-problem combinations are utilized in the discrete algorithm. Compared with other finite element methods in the literature, the new method has some distinguished advantages and features. The Boland-Nicolaides trick is used in proving the inf-sup condition for the multidomain discrete problem. Optimal error estimates are derived for the coupled problem by analyzing the approximation errors and the consistency errors. Numerical examples are also provided to confirm the theoretical results.

In the paper, a new time second-order mass-conserved implicit/explicit domain decomposition method (DDM) for the diffusion equations is proposed. In the scheme, firstly, we calculate the interface fluxes of sub-domains from the obtained solutions and fluxes at the previous time level, for which we apply high-order Taylor’s expansion and transfer the time derivatives to spatial derivatives to improve the accuracy. Secondly, the interior solutions and fluxes in sub-domains are computed by the implicit scheme and using the relations between solutions and fluxes, without any correction step. The mass conservation is proved and the convergence order of the numerical solutions is proved to be second-order in both time and space steps. The super-convergence of numerical fluxes is also proved to be second-order in both time and space steps. The scheme is stable under the stable condition r≤3/5. The important feature is that the proposed domain decomposition scheme is mass-conserved and is of second order convergence in time. Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical results.

In this work, we study numerical methods for a coupled fluid-porous media flow model. The model consists of Stokes equations and Darcy's equations in two neighboring subdomains, coupling together through certain interface conditions. The weak form for the coupled model is of saddle point type. A mortar finite element method is proposed to approximate the weak form of the coupled problem. In our method, nonconforming Crouzeix-Raviart elements are applied in the fluid subdomain and the lowest order Raviart-Thomas elements are applied in the porous media subdomain; Meshes in different subdomains are allowed to be nonmatching on the common interface; Interface conditions are weakly imposed via adding constraint in the definition of the finite element space. The well-posedness of the discrete problem and the optimal error estimate for the proposed method are established. Numerical experiments are also given to confirm the theoretical results.

Effects of viscous dissipation and radiation on MHD natural convection in oblique porous cavity with constant heat flux is studied numerically in the present article. The right inclined wall is maintained at a constant cold temperature Tc and the left inclined wall has a constant heat flux q with length S, while the remainder of the left wall is adiabatic. The horizontal walls are assumed to be adiabatic. The governing equations are obtained by applying the Darcy model and Boussinesq approximations. COMSOL's finite element method is used to solve the non-dimensional governing equations together with specified boundary conditions. The governing parameters of this study are Rayleigh number (Ra=10,100,200,250,500 and 1000), Hartmann number (0≤ Ha ≤20), inclination angle of the magnetic field (0° ≤ ω ≤ π/2), Radiation (0≤R≤15), the heater flux length (0.1≤H≤1) and inclination angle of the sloping wall (–π/3≤ϕ≤π/3). The results are considered for various values of the governing parameters in terms of streamlines, isotherms and averageNusselt number. It is found that the intensity of the streamlines and the isotherm patterns decrease with an increment in Hartmann number. The overall heat transfer is significantly increased with the increment of the viscous dissipation and the radiation parameters.

Velocity of fluid flow in underground porous media is 6~12 orders of magnitudes lower than that in pipelines. If numerical errors are not carefully controlled in this kind of simulations, high distortion of the final results may occur [1–4]. To fit the high accuracy demands of fluid flow simulations in porous media, traditional finite difference methods and numerical integration methods are discussed and corresponding high-accurate methods are developed. When applied to the direct calculation of full-tensor permeability for underground flow, the high-accurate finite difference method is confirmed to have numerical error as low as 10–5% while the high-accurate numerical integration method has numerical error around 0%. Thus, the approach combining the high-accurate finite difference and numerical integration methods is a reliable way to efficiently determine the characteristics of general full-tensor permeability such as maximum and minimum permeability components, principal direction and anisotropic ratio.

The unified lattice Boltzmann model is extended to the quadtree grids for simulation of fluid flow through porous media. The unified lattice Boltzmann model is capable of simulating flow in porous media at various scales or in systems where multiple length scales coexist. The quadtree grid is able to provide a high-resolution approximation to complex geometries, with great flexibility to control local grid density. The combination of the unified lattice Boltzmann model and the quadtree grids results in an efficient numerical model for calculating permeability of multi-scale porous media. The model is used for permeability calculation for three systems, including a fractured system used in a previous study, a Voronoi tessellation system, and a computationally-generated pore structure of fractured shale. The results are compared with those obtained using the conventional lattice Boltzmann model or the unified lattice Boltzmann model on rectangular or uniform square grid. It is shown that the proposed model is an accurate and efficient tool for flow simulation in multi-scale porous media. In addition, for the fractured shale, the contribution of flow in matrix and fractures to the overall permeability of the fractured shale is studied systematically.

In the paper, we develop and analyze a new mass-preserving splitting domain decomposition method over multiple sub-domains for solving parabolic equations. The domain is divided into non-overlapping multi-bock sub-domains. On the interfaces of sub-domains, the interface fluxes are computed by the semi-implicit (explicit) flux scheme. The solutions and fluxes in the interiors of sub-domains are computed by the splitting one-dimensional implicit solution-flux coupled scheme. The important feature is that the proposed scheme is mass conservative over multiple non-overlapping sub-domains. Analyzing the mass-preserving S-DDM scheme is difficult over non-overlapping multi-block sub-domains due to the combination of the splitting technique and the domain decomposition at each time step. We prove theoretically that our scheme satisfies conservation of mass over multi-block non-overlapping sub-domains and it is unconditionally stable. We further prove the convergence and obtain the error estimate in L2-norm. Numerical experiments confirm theoretical results.

An analysis is performed to study the influence of local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE) on unsteady MHD laminar boundary layer flow of viscous, incompressible fluid over a vertical stretching plate embedded in a sparsely packed porous medium in the presence of heat generation/absorption. The flow in the porous medium is governed by Brinkman-Forchheimer extended Darcy model. A uniform heat source or sink is presented in the solid phase. By applying similarity analysis, the governing partial differential equations are transformed into a set of time dependent non-linear coupled ordinary differential equations and they are solved numerically by Runge-Kutta Fehlberg method along with shooting technique. The obtained results are displayed graphically to illustrate the influence of different physical parameters on the velocity, temperature profile and heat transfer rate for both fluid and solid phases. Moreover, the numerical results obtained in this study are compared with the existing literature in the case of LTE and found that they are in good agreement.

In this paper, we study the effects of inserted needle on the subcutaneous interstitial flow. A goal is to describe the physical stress affecting cells during acupuncture treatment. The model consists of the convective Brinkman equations to describe the flow through a fibrous medium. Numerical studies in FreeFem++ are performed to illustrate the acute physical stress developed by the implantation of a needle that triggers the physiological reactions of acupuncture. We emphasize the importance of numerical experiments for advancing in modeling in acupuncture.

The adaptation of Crouzeix-Raviart finite element in the context of multi-scale finite element method (MsFEM) is studied and implemented on diffusion and advection-diffusion problems in perforated media. It is known that the approximation of boundary condition on coarse element edges when computing the multiscale basis functions critically influences the eventual accuracy of any MsFEM approaches. The weakly enforced continuity of Crouzeix-Raviart function space across element edges leads to a natural boundary condition for the multiscale basis functions which relaxes the sensitivity of our method to complex patterns of perforations. Another ingredient to our method is the application of bubble functions which is shown to be instrumental in maintaining high accuracy amid dense perforations. Additionally, the application of penalization method makes it possible to avoid complex unstructured domain and allows extensive use of simpler Cartesian meshes.