Influence of Nonlinear Local Properties on Effective Transport

The assumption of constant local coefficients is one of the first restrictions in most of the smoothing theories for transport in porous media. In this paper we present a formal analysis of the effects produced by nonconstant local transport coefficients on the nonlinear behavior of the effective transport properties. In particular, we use the volume averaging method to study heat transport in a two-component system considering the local thermal conductivities as analytical functions of the temperature. Within this approach we obtain a general expression for the effective nonlinear thermal conductivity dependence on the averaged temperature gradient. The important result is that the effective conductivity is obtained by a linearly bounded problem (the closure problem), just as if the conductivities were constants, by replacing the constant conductivities by the actual temperature dependent ones. As an example, we model the porous medium as cylindrical inclusions in a periodic array and solve the closure problem for the case of the one-equation model. We analyze the values of the second derivative of the thermal conductivity with respect to the temperature to establish the range where the nonlinear corrections must be considered to correctly describe the effective transport.