Modeling Isothermal Flow in Saturated Porous Media Compressing between Two Parallel Plates

Abstract

Many of manufacturing processes in composite industry consist of injecting/squeezing a metallic, ceramic, or polymeric melt in-to/out-of a deformable porous material, which can be made of solid constituents in the form of mats, fibers, whiskers, particulates, flakes, or wires. Examples of practical application of such processes are compression molding, injection/compression type liquid composite molding and squeeze casting, with additional applications in the fields of lubrication and bio-medicine. This paper presents a unified approach of developing governing equations for pressure during the squeezing of saturated porous media between two parallel plates. It starts with a combination of Darcy's law and continuity equation that yields a partial differential equation for pressure inside saturated porous media. The suggested governing equation was also solved analytically for two simple cases: 1) squeezing a saturated anisotropic porous medium between two rectangular plates, 2) squeezing a saturated isotropic porous medium between two circular plates. The results of the corresponding pressure and velocity fields were discussed.