A combined experimental/numerical approach to study the thermal dispersion in porous media flows

The non-isothermal transport during flow in porous media is studied for single- and dualscale porous media. A new combined experimental/numerical approach to estimating the thermal dispersion tensor is introduced and applied for both isotropic (single-scale) and anisotropic (dualscale) porous media. The equivalence between the heat and mass transfer is exploited and a 1-D flow experimental setup is employed to study the spreading of a dye. Later, the mathematical model for such a spreading of concentration (equivalent to the temperature) around a point input in a constant velocity field is solved using the finite element based code COMSOL. Thus obtained numerical spreading pattern is fitted onto the experimentally observed one using the dispersion matrix (tensor) as a fitting parameter. A few cases of single- and dual-scale porous media are studied and the dispersion tensors are reported for each individual case. In one case, the results are validated with the available experimental data in the literature which shows a good match