Macroscopic model of multicomponent fluids in porous media

This article is about a macroscopic model simulating the heat and mass transfer of a fluid containing numerous species in porous media. In order to use it in the modelling of petroleum fields, the physical phenomena studied are gravitational segregation, thermal diffusion, convection and diffusion. The originality of this approach is to simulate the movement of each component in order to deduce the species distribution and mixture flow. The mass flux calculated by an entropic balance is compared with the Darcy equation to evaluate the phenomenological coefficients. After presenting the possible origins of composition variations and the ways that they are usually studied, the article describes the developments that have led to the new model and finally reports the first results obtained.