A Brief Introduction to Convection in Porous Media

This paper serves as a brief introduction to the longer introduction provided by the book by Nield and Bejan (NB). Attention is focussed on the modelling of the interaction of the heat transfer and the presence of a porous medium. Except for a brief mention, convection in unsaturated media is beyond the scope of this book and hence this review. Our coverage is mainly confined to single phase flow. The effects of radiation considered are confined to a contribution to volumetric heating produced by the absorption of radiation. Topics covered relate to both pore scale (microscale) and macroscale modelling and processes. Both theoretical and experiment studies are considered. Whilst NB contains a section on deformable media, the book is largely constrained to rigid porous media. This review is confined to matters concerning rigid porous media.