Heat and Moisture Transport in Unsaturated Porous Media -- A Coupled Model in Terms of Chemical Potential

Abstract

Transport phenomena in porous media are commonplace in our daily lives. Examples and applications include heat and moisture transport in soils, baking and drying of food stuffs, curing of cement, and evaporation of fuels in wild fires. Of particular interest to this study are heat and moisture transport in unsaturated soils. Historically, mathematical models for these processes are derived by coupling classical Darcy's, Fourier's, and Fick's laws with volume averaged conservation of mass and energy and empirically based source and sink terms. Recent experimental and mathematical research has proposed modifications and suggested limitations in these classical equations. The primary goal of this thesis is to derive a thermodynamically consistent system of equations for heat and moisture transport in terms of the chemical potential that addresses some of these limitations. The physical processes of interest are primarily diffusive in nature and, for that reason, we focus on using the macroscale chemical potential to build and simplify the models. The resulting coupled system of nonlinear partial differential equations is solved numerically and validated against the classical equations and against experimental data. It will be shown that under a mixture theoretic framework, the classical Richards' equation for saturation is supplemented with gradients in temperature, relative humidity, and the time rate of change of saturation. Furthermore, it will be shown that restating the water vapor diffusion equation in terms of chemical potential eliminates the necessity for an empirically based fitting parameter.