Coupled Upscaling Approaches For Conduction, Convection, and Radiation in Porous Media: Theoretical Developments

This study deals with macroscopic modeling of heat transfer in porous media subjected to high temperature. The derivation of the macroscopic model, based on thermal non-equilibrium, includes coupling of radiation with the other heat transfer modes. In order to account for non-Beerian homogenized phases, the radiation model is based on the generalized radiation transfer equation and, under some conditions, on the radiative Fourier law. The originality of the present upscaling procedure lies in the application of the volume averaging method to local energy conservation equations in which radiation transfer is included. This coupled homogenization mainly raises three challenges. First, the physical natures of the coupled heat transfer modes are different. We have to deal with the coexistence of both the material system (where heat conduction and/or convection take place) and the non-material radiation field composed of photons. This radiation field is homogenized using a statistical approach leading to the definition of radiation properties characterized by statistical functions continuously defined in the whole volume of the porous medium. The second difficulty concerns the different scales involved in the upscaling procedure. Scale separation, required by the volume averaging method, must be compatible with the characteristic length scale of the statistical approach. The third challenge lies in radiation emission modeling, which depends on the temperature of the material system. For a semi-transparent phase, this temperature is obtained by averaging the local-scale temperature using a radiation intrinsic average while a radiation interface average is used for an opaque phase. This coupled upscaling procedure is applied to different combinations of opaque, transparent, or semi-transparent phases. The resulting macroscopic models involve several effective transport properties which are obtained by solving closure problems derived from the local-scale physics.