An effective thermal conductivity model for the three-phase porous media based on the numerical simulation

Abstract

Heat conduction in the porous media (PM) with gas-liquid-solid three-phase has been numerically investigated. The validation of the adopted numerical method is performed by comparing the effective thermal conductivity (ETC) obtained from the simulation results with the experimental data. The results show that the ETC of the PM increases with increasing solid volume fraction (ϕ_s) and liquid saturation degree (Sr). Sr has a weaker effect on the ETC compared to ϕ_s. Similar variation laws of the ETC with Sr and ϕ_s are found for systems with different solid and liquid thermal conductivity. In this work, the PM is simplified as a circuit network. The modeling for the ETC is performed by defining a weighted harmonic parameter (η) to connect the serial and parallel models. η is closed as a function of Sr, ϕ_s and the thermal conductivity of the solid and liquid phases. The predictability of the model is evaluated. The results demonstrate that the model can provide accurate estimations for the ETC of the three-phase PM.

Keywords:

• Conduction
• effective thermal conductivity
• heat conduction
• numerical method
• porous media
• three-phase

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the financial support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22078255, 21978228). We are also grateful to the computation supported by HPC Platform, Xi’an Jiaotong University.

Data availability statement

The data that support the finding of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.