Heat Convection and Conduction
The Heat Transfer in Porous Media Interface can also set up analyses for heat transferred by convection and conduction for subsurface flow applications. Use this physics interface to describe heat carried by moving oil, water, or magma that you describe with a velocity field. Presumably the fluid velocity is nonzero but not necessarily so. You can couple the Heat Transfer interface to a Fluid Flow interface if you want to model, for example, rising magma, hot springs, liquid-steam transfers, conduction in a solid rock, buoyancy flow in streams, magma convection, and hot oil moving through a pipe. For models involving large depth changes, this physics interface provides a number of options to characterize the geothermal gradient.
The physics interface assumes that the model domain includes a single fluid moving through a domain with a number of immobile constituents, including several different solids and trapped fluids. Such is the case in many porous media.
The physics interface can also describe heat transferred with a moving fluid, which can be a surface flow or one confined to interstices in a porous medium. Analyses can cover thermal pollution migrating in a stream, transfer of hot oil into and up a well, steam injection, and diurnal heating in variably saturated soil.
In this context it is worth mentioning that it is possible to model inflow of heat through a virtual domain at inlet boundaries of fluid domains using the so-called Inflow boundary condition. Accordingly, an Outflow Boundary condition is available at the outlet. Furthermore, an Open Boundary condition is available to define a boundary as the limit between a nonsolid domain of the geometry and the rest of the same fluid domain that is not represented in the geometry. At the open boundary both inflow and outflow conditions are supported.
This physics interface easily combines with others for an unlimited number of interesting analyses. Consider, for example, that it is straightforward to include the impacts of temperature change on hydraulic conductivity, biodegradation and chemical reaction rates, electric and magnetic potential fields, and rock strength. Likewise, you can feed back results of other physics, including reactions that consume heat, to a heat transfer model.