Mass conservation microscale

Note 5.4 (On the permeability andflow in a porous medium). The seepage equation can be obtained by substituting Darcy s law into the mass conservation equations of fluid and solid phases, as described above. The effects of the micro-structure and microscale material property are put into the hydraulic conductivity k, which is fundamentally specified through experiments. It is not possible to specify the true velocity field by this theory, whereas by applying a homogenization technique, we can determine the velocity field that will be affected by the microscale characteristics. In Chap. 8 we will outline the homogenization theory, which is applied to the problem of water flow in a porous medium, where the microscale flow field is specified. 

Hybrid mixture theory is a hybridization of classical volume averaging of field equations (conservation of mass, momenta, energy) and classical theory of mixtures [8] whose theory of constitution results from the exploitation of the entropy inequality in the sense of Coleman and Noll [9], In [4] the microscale field equations for each species of each phase, modified appropriately to include charges, polarization, and an electric field, are averaged to the macroscale, defined to be the scale where the phases are indistinguishable. Thus at the macroscale the porous media is viewed a mixture, with each thermodynamic property for each constituent of each phase defined at each point in space. 

More often, three-dimensional gridded meteorological forecast data provided by mesoscale meteorological models such as MM5 will be available. The resolution of the grid will typically be on the order of 1 km, which is too large to capture microscale surface features. Mesoscale model results can be coupled with fine-scale models by enforcing conservation of mass to provide enhanced fine-scale detail. 

In the formulation of a mesoscale model, the number-density function (NDF) plays a key role. For this reason, we discuss the properties of the NDF in some detail in Chapter 2. In words, the NDF is the number of particles per unit volume with a given set of values for the mesoscale variables. Since at any time instant a microscale particle will have a unique set of microscale variables, the NDF is also referred to as the one-particle NDF. In general, the one-particle NDF is nonzero only for realizable values of the mesoscale variables. In other words, the realizable mesoscale values are the ones observed in the ensemble of all particles appearing in the microscale simulation. In contrast, sets of mesoscale values that are never observed in the microscale simulations are non-realizable. Realizability constraints may occur for a variety of reasons, e.g. due to conservation of mass, momentum, energy, etc., and are intrinsic properties of the microscale model. It is also important to note that the mesoscale values are usually strongly correlated. By this we mean that the NDF for any two mesoscale variables cannot be reconstructed from knowledge of the separate NDFs for each variable. Thus, by construction, the one-particle NDF contains all of the underlying correlations between the mesoscale variables for only one particle. 

Microscale fluid turbulence is, by deflnition, present only when the continuous fluid phase is present. The coefficients Bpv describe the interaction of the particle phase with the continuous phase. In contrast, Bpvf models rapid fluctuations in the fluid velocity seen by the particle that are not included in the mesoscale drag term Ap. In the mesoscale particle momentum balance, the term that generates Bpv will depend on the fluid-phase mass density and, hence, will be null when the fluid material density (pf) is null. In any case, Bpv models momentum transfer to/from the particle phase in fluid-particle systems for which the total momentum is conserved (see discussion leading to Eq. (5.17)). 

If we then denote the (constant) particle and fluid masses by and tWf, respectively, the conservation of momentum at the microscale can be expressed as... 

---