- Martin Schneider (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
- Holger Class (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
- Rainer Helmig (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
- Costanza Aricò (University of Palermo, Italy)
- Donatella Termini (University of Palermo, Italy)
Transport phenomena of coupled free flow and porous-medium flow occur in several environmental, industrial and biological applications. These include surface and groundwater flow, contaminant transport from lakes by groundwater, soil evaporation, fuel cells, oil filters, passive flow control devices, food drying, blood flow in vessels and tissue, or transport of therapeutic agents.
When modelling such applications, physical processes occur over several spatial and temporal scales. Typically, averaged continuum models, based on the representative elementary volume (REV) approach, are used for meso- and macro-scale simulations to overcome the high computational effort required by direct numerical simulations (DNS) when modelling these types of systems on the pore-scale. However, this leads to a loss of detailed pore-scale processes which might strongly affect the global system behavior. Pore network models represent an attractive tool for understanding and predicting meso-scale phenomena by abstracting pore geometries into pore bodies and pore throats, allowing to efficiently perform pore-scale simulations
This mini-symposium is mainly devoted to provide an insight into the physical, mathematical and numerical modelling of coupled free flow and porous-medium flow systems related to recent theoretical, numerical and experimental findings and challenges. Furthermore, recent numerical and mathematical developments related to the REV-scale description of averaged or upscaled pore-scale phenomena using effective REV models shall be addressed and discussed within this mini-symposium.
Keywords: free fluid and porous medium flow, pore scale, pore network model, REV, continuum model, DNS, transport process, single phase, multiphase
