Thermo-Osmosis Effect in Saturated Porous Medium

In this paper, the thermo-poroelasticity theory is used to investigate the quasi-static response of temperatures, pore pressure, stress, displacement, and fluid flux around a cylindrical borehole subjected to impact thermal and mechanical loadings in an infinite saturated poroelastic medium. It has been reported in literatures that coupled flow known as thermo-osmosis by which flux is driven by temperature gradient, can significantly change the fluid flux in clay, argillaceous and many other porous materials whose permeability coefficients are very small. This study presents a mathematical model to investigate the coupled effect of thermo-osmosis in saturated porous medium. The energy balance equations presented here fulfill local thermal non-equilibrium condition (LTNE) which is different from the local thermal equilibrium transfer theory, accounting for that temperatures of solid and fluid phases are not the same and governed by different heat transfer equations. Analytical solutions of temperatures, pore pressure, stress, displacement, and fluid flux are obtained in Laplace transform space. Numerical results for a typical clay are used to investigate the effect of thermo-osmosis. The effects of LTNE on temperatures, pore pressure, and stress are also studied in this paper.