Effect of Gas Slip on Unsteady Flow of Gas Through Porous Media - Experimental Verification

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents an experimental verification of numerical solutions of the differential equation describing the transient flow of an ideal gas through a porous material including gas slip effects. Several experiments previously proposed by one of the authors are described together with the correlation of the experimental results with the numerical solutions. Excellent agreement is shown between experiment and theory, thus demonstrating the validity of both the basic assumption made in the derivation of the differential equation and of the numerical solutions of the differential equation. Introduction In a recent paper, one of the authors has discussed a numerical solution of the differential equation describing the unsteady flow of an ideal gas through a porous material. This paper was primarily concerned with the effect of gas slip on the flow behavior. In steady state measurements, Klinkenberg and others have observed that the apparent gas permeability of a porous material may be expressed as a linear function of the reciprocal average pressure of the form, (Equation 1) where the intercept is a constant for a given porous material and the slope is a constant for a given porous material-gas combination. A number of numerical solutions of the resultant differential equation were presented and specific flow experiments were proposed as a means of testing the numerical solutions. The purpose of the present paper is to describe the results of several of these experiments and the correlation of the experimental data with the results of the numerical analysis. Reference should be made to the previous paper for details of the mathematical and numerical analysis.