About Darcy's law in non‐Galilean frame

Abstract

AbstractThis paper is aimed towards investigating the filtration law of an incompressible viscous Newtonian fluid through a rigid non‐inertial porous medium (e.g. a porous medium placed in a centrifuge basket). The filtration law is obtained by upscaling the flow equations at the pore scale. The upscaling technique is the homogenization method of multiple scale expansions which rigorously gives the macroscopic behaviour and the effective properties without any prerequisite on the form of the macroscopic equations. The derived filtration law is similar to Darcy's law, but the tensor of permeability presents the following remarkable properties: it depends upon the angular velocity of the porous matrix, it verifies Hall–Onsager's relationship and it is a non‐symmetric tensor. We thus deduce that, under rotation, an isotropic porous medium leads to a non‐isotropic effective permeability. In this paper, we present the results of numerical simulations of the flow through rotating porous media. This allows us to highlight the deviations of the flow due to Coriolis effects at both the microscopic scale (i.e. the pore scale), and the macroscopic scale (i.e. the sample scale). The above results confirm that for an isotropic medium, phenomenological laws already proposed in the literature fails at reproducing three‐dimensional Coriolis effects in all types of pores geometry. We show that Coriolis effects may lead to significant variations of the permeability measured during centrifuge tests when the inverse Ekman number Ek−1 is 𝒪(1). These variations are estimated to be less than 5% if Ek−1<0.2, which is the case of classical geotechnical centrifuge tests. We finally conclude by showing that available experimental data from tests carried out in centrifuges are not sufficient to determining the effective tensor of permeability of rotating porous media. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.