A two-phase mixture model of liquid-gas flow and heat transfer in capillary porous media. I: Formulation. II: Application to pressure- driven boiling flow adjacent to a vertical heated plate (Q1261988)

A model for two-phase transport in capillary porous media is presented, in which the two phases are viewed as constituents of a binary mixture. The conservation equations are derived from the classical separate flow model without invoking additional assumptions. Several complicated problems such as boundary layer two-phase flows, conjugate two- and single-phase flows in multiple regions and transient flows are shown to become more tractable within the framework of this new formulation. The model is applied to investigate a pressure-driven two-phase boiling flow along a heated surface embedded in a porous medium. Using approximations analogous to the classical boundary layer theory, a set of boundary layer equations for two-phase flow is derived and solved by a similarity transformation. The resulting ordinary differential equations are numerically integrated using a combination of the Gear stiff method and a shooting procedure.