Introduction

Porous media are encountered in many natural and man-made systems. The need for advanced porous media modeling spans many industries and application areas such as processes in fuel cells, drying of pulp and paper, food production, filtration processes, and so on.

The Porous Media Flow Module extends the COMSOL Multiphysics modeling environment to the quantitative investigation of mass, momentum, and energy transport in porous media. It is designed for researchers, engineers, teachers, and students, and it suits both single-physics and multiphysics modeling.

The contents of the Porous Media Flow Module are a set of fundamental building blocks which cover a wide array of physics questions. The physics interfaces it offers work on their own or linked to each other. They can also be coupled to physics interfaces already built into COMSOL Multiphysics, or to new equations you create.

The physics interfaces, options, and functionalities in this module are tailored to account for processes in porous media. The Heat Transfer interfaces, for example, include options to automate the calculation of effective thermal properties for multicomponent systems. The fluid flow equations represent a wide range of possibilities. Included are Richards’ equation, which describes nonlinear flow in variably saturated porous media. The options for saturated porous media include Darcy’s law for slow flow and the Brinkman equations where shear is nonnegligible. The Laminar Flow and Creeping Flow interfaces cover free flows at different Reynolds numbers. The module also treats the transport of chemical species. The Transport of Diluted Species interface account for the transport of species in free flow, saturated, and partially saturated porous media. A number of examples link these physics interfaces together.

You can use the Porous Media Flow Module in combination with essentially any of the other products in the COMSOL product suite. The module is a general interface for computing optimal solutions to engineering problems to, for example, improve a design so that it minimizes energy consumption or maximizes the output.