Impact of porous media heterogeneity on convective mixing in a Rayleigh-B\'enard instability

TL;DR

This study investigates how heterogeneity in porous media affects convective mixing and flow patterns during Rayleigh-Bénard instability, revealing increased heat flux but reduced mixing efficiency with greater heterogeneity.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of heterogeneity effects on convective patterns in porous media using multi-Gaussian permeability fields, highlighting new insights into flow structure and mixing behavior.

Findings

Heat flux increases with heterogeneity compared to homogeneous media.

Higher permeability variance and correlation length lead to increased temperature segregation.

Heterogeneity causes more interface stretching and alters flow structures near boundaries.

Abstract

This work studies the effect of the heterogeneity of a porous medium on convective mixing. We consider a system where a Rayleigh-B\'enard instability is triggered by a temperature difference between the top and bottom boundaries. Heterogeneity is represented by multi-Gaussian log-normally distributed permeability fields. We explore the effect of the Rayleigh number, the variance and correlation length of the log-permeability field on the fingering patterns, heat flux, mixing state and flow structure. Heat flux increases for all heterogeneous cases compared to the homogeneous ones. When heterogeneity is weak and the horizontal correlation length small, flux exhibits minimal sensitivity to the variance of the log-permeability. When the correlation length increases, flux increases proportionally to the log-permeability variance. The mixing state is evaluated through the temperature variance and the intensity of segregation. Both take higher values, compared to their homogeneous analogues, when the correlation length and the variance of the permeability are increased. This indicates that even if heat flux increases, the system is less well mixed. The flow structure shows that in homogeneous and weakly heterogeneous cases there is a relation between the location of high strain rate and stagnation point, while for strongly heterogeneous cases, high strain rate zones are linked to high permeability areas near the boundaries, where temperature plume originate. The interface width tends to decrease as the variance and the correlation length of the permeability field are augmented, suggesting that the interface undergoes a higher stretching in heterogeneous porous media.