The study of flow through porous media is of importance in connection with many geological applications. Such diversified fields as soil mechanics, ground water hydrology and petroleum engineering rely heavily on it as basic to their individual problems.
Porous media
Porous media are solid bodies that contain ‘pores,’ small void spaces, which are distributed more or less frequently throughout the material. The problem of complete geometric characterization of a porous medium has not yet been solved. One is able only to define some geometric parameters of a porous medium that are based on averages. The first of these is the porosity, P, which is equal to the average ratio of the void volume to the bulk volume of the porous medium. The second is the specific surface area, S, which is the average ratio of internal surface to the bulk volume of the porous medium.
Darcy's law
More than a century ago, Henri Darcy (1856)made some experiments to investigate the flow of water through the sand...
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Cross references
Drainage; Hydrology; Hydromechanics; Soil and water management; Water: categories; Water movement in unsaturated soils
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Wendland, W.M., Scheidegger, A.E. (1998). Hydrodynamics: Porous media. In: Herschy, R.W., Fairbridge, R.W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Hydrology and Water Resources. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4497-7_112
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