Published 12 issues per year
ISSN Print: 1091-028X
ISSN Online: 1934-0508
Indexed in
Third International Conference on Porous Media and its Applications in Science, Engineering and Industry
June 20-24, 2010, Tuscany, Italy
ABSTRACT
We had organized and held two highly successful conferences on Porous Media and its Applications in Science, Engineering and Industry were held in 1996 in Kona, Hawaii, and in 2007 in Kauai, Hawaii, which were attended by various researchers in porous media worldwide. This conference will build on the last two conferences so that it reflects the research done internationally in the currently active areas of the topic. The presence of the highly successful Journal of Porous Media and both editions of the very well received Handbook of Porous Media will act as an additional impetus to further galvanize this conference. Papers of high quality will be considered for submission to the Journal of Porous Media.
The pioneering works in the area of fluid transport as well as some aspects of heat transport in porous media go back to the beginning of this century. Convective heat transfer in fluid-saturated porous media has gained considerable attention in recent decades due to its relevance in a wide range of applications such as thermal insulation engineering, water movements in geothermal reservoirs, heat pipes, underground spreading of chemical waste, nuclear waste repository, geothermal engineering, grain storage and enhanced recovery of petroleum reservoirs. Radiative heat transfer and multiphase transport processes in porous media, both with and without phase change, have gained extensive attention in recent years. This is due to the wide range of applicability of these research areas in contemporary technology. These applications include, but are not restricted to, areas such as geothermal engineering, building thermal insulation, chemical catalytic reactors, packed cryogenic microsphere insulation, petroleum reservoirs, direct contact heat exchangers, coal combustors, nuclear waste repositories, and heat pipe technology.
Several applications related to porous media require a detailed analysis of convective heat transfer in different geometrical shapes, orientations and configurations. Based on the specific applications, the flow in the porous medium may be internal or external. Most of the studies in porous media carried out until the past two decades are based on the Darcy flow model, which in turn is based on the assumption of creeping flow through an infinitely extended uniform medium. However, it is now generally recognized that non-Darcian effects are quite important for certain applications. Different models have been introduced for studying and accounting for such non-Darcian effects as the inertial, boundary, and variable porosity effects. The ultimate goal of studies in convective heat transfer in porous media is to determine the dimensionless heat transfer coefficient, the Nusselt number. A considerable amount of research has been carried out to accomplish this, and empirical correlations for the Nusselt number for a variety of configurations and boundary conditions have been established, with certain limitation, of a wide variety of current technological applications. Many industrial operations in the areas of chemical and metallurgical engineering involve the passage of a fluid stream through a packed bed of particulate solids to obtain extended solid fluid interfacial areas or good fluid mixing. Typical examples of applications involving such systems include catalytic and chromatographic reactions, packed absorption and distillation towers, ion exchange columns, packed filters, pebble-type heat exchanger, petroleum reservoirs, geothermal operations and many others. The design of these systems is decided by mechanisms of pressure drop, fluid flow and heat and mass transfer governing the process in the packed bed arrangement. Considerable attention has been paid to the aforementioned aspects because of their direct influence on the optimization and stability of the design of these systems.
Developments in modeling transport phenomena in porous media have advanced several pertinent areas, such as biology. As such the conference will also entertain papers related to bio transport in porous media as well as research related to turbulent modeling in porous media.