System application to nondestructive study of coupled flow in porous media

A non-destructive system approach is developed and applied to the study of coupled flow in porous media subject to hydraulic and thermal gradients. The approach makes use of the transient pressure and temperature responses of the saturated porous media under applied gradients to obtain the flow related soil parameters. An experimental one-dimensional set-up is developed to apply the gradients and measure the real time pressure and temperature responses of the system along the sample. The analytical governing equations for the transient development of the fluxes of a multi-component system are derived based on conservation equations and nonequilibrium thermodynamics theories. The analytical model is then used to form the appropriate numerical simulation environment, which is constructed to solve the governing set of partial differential equations. The soil parameters defining the heat and fluid flow in porous media are obtained by constructing an optimization environment, which obtains the parameters by minimizing the objective function. The objective function is defined as the sum of the least squares of the experimental and numerical responses of the system.