The main purpose of this book is to provide the theoretical background
to engineers and scientists engaged in modeling transport phenomena in
porous media, in connection with various engineering projects, and to
serve as a text for senior and graduate courses on transport phenomena
in porous media. Such courses are taught in various disciplines, e. g.,
civil engineering, chemical engineering, reservoir engineering,
agricultural engineering and soil science. In these disciplines,
problems are encountered in which various extensive quantities, e. g.,
mass and heat, are transported through a porous material domain. Often
the porous material contains several fluid phases, and the various
extensive quantities are transported simultaneously throughout the
multiphase system. In all these disciplines, management decisions
related to a system's development and its operation have to be made. To
do so, the 'manager', or the planner, needs a tool that will enable him
to forecast the response of the system to the implementation of proposed
management schemes. This forecast takes the form of spatial and temporal
distributions of variables that describe the future state of the
considered system. Pressure, stress, strain, density, velocity, solute
concentration, temperature, etc., for each phase in the system, and
sometime for a component of a phase, may serve as examples of state
variables. The tool that enables the required predictions is the model.
A model may be defined as a simplified version of the real (porous
medium) system that approximately simulates the excitation-response
relations of the latter.