Darcy's Law - Additional Forms of Darcy's Law

Additional Forms of Darcy's Law

For very short time scales, a time derivative of flux may be added to Darcy's law, which results in valid solutions at very small times (in heat transfer, this is called the modified form of Fourier's law),

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where τ is a very small time constant which causes this equation to reduce to the normal form of Darcy's law at "normal" times (> nanoseconds). The main reason for doing this is that the regular groundwater flow equation (diffusion equation) leads to singularities at constant head boundaries at very small times. This form is more mathematically rigorous, but leads to a hyperbolic groundwater flow equation, which is more difficult to solve and is only useful at very small times, typically out of the realm of practical use.

Another extension to the traditional form of Darcy's law is the Brinkman term, which is used to account for transitional flow between boundaries (introduced by Brinkman in 1949 ),

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where β is an effective viscosity term. This correction term accounts for flow through medium where the grains of the media are porous themselves, but is difficult to use, and is typically neglected.

Another derivation of Darcy's law is used extensively in petroleum engineering to determine the flow through permeable media - the most simple of which is for a one dimensional, homogeneous rock formation with a fluid of constant viscosity.

,

where Q is the flowrate of the formation (in units of volume per unit time), k is the relative permeability of the formation (typically in millidarcies), A is the cross-sectional area of the formation, μ is the viscosity of the fluid (typically in units of centipoise, and L is the length of the porous media the fluid will flow through. represents the pressure change per unit length of the formation. This equation can also be solved for permeability, allowing for relative permeability to be calculated by forcing a fluid of known viscosity through a core of a known length and area, and measuring the pressure drop across the length of the core.

For very high velocities in porous media, inertial effects can also become significant. Sometimes an inertial term is added to the Darcy's equation, known as Forchheimer term. This term is able to account for the non-linear behavior of the pressure difference vs velocity data.

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where the additional term is known as inertial permeability.

Darcy's law is valid only for flow in continuum region. For a flow in transition region, where both viscous and Knudsen friction are present a new formulation is used, which is known as binary friction model

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where is the Knudsen diffusivity of the fluid in porous media.