Homogenization of degenerate coupled fluid flows and heat transport through porous media

Abstract

We establish a homogenization result for a fully nonlinear degenerate parabolic system with critical growth arising from the heat and moisture flow through a partially saturated porous media. Existence of a global weak solution of the mesoscale problem is proven by means of a semidiscretization in time, a priori estimates and passing to the limit from discrete approximations. After that, porous material exhibiting periodic spatial oscillations is considered and the two-scale convergence (as the oscillation period vanishes) to a corresponding homogenized problem is rigorously proven.