A two-phase mixture model of liquid-gas flow and heat transfer in capillary porous media-l. Formulation

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 ad~tional assumptions. The present fo~ulation, owing to its anaiogy to conventional multicomponent mixture flow theories and to a considerable reduction in the number of the differential equations required for the primary variables, provides an alternative for the theoretical analysis and numerical simulation of two-phase transport phenomena in porous media. Several complicated problems such as boundary layer two-phase flows, conjugate twoand single-phase flows in multiple regions and transient flows are shown to become more tractable within the framework of this new formulation.