On the numerical treatment of multiphasic flow processes in deformable porous media

Abstract

The description of multiphasic flow processes and their interaction with a deformable solid skeleton plays an important role in a big field of engineering applications, as for example in the modelling of partially saturated soil or groundwater contamination. For a numerical simulation of such a material behaviour, a triphasic continuum mechanical model based on a multiphasic formulation embedded in the well-founded framework of the Theory of Porous Media (TPM) is used. Therein, the single constituents are a materially incompressible elasto-viscoplastic solid skeleton and materially compressible or incompressible pore-fluids, e. g., water, oil or air. The numerical treatment is based on the weak formulations of the governing equations, where the primary variables are the displacement of the solid skeleton and the effective pressures or saturations of the pore-fluids. An initial boundary-value problem concerning an infiltration problem in a heterogeneous porous material is discussed in detail, where the resulting system of strongly coupled differential-algebraic equations is solved by the FE tool PANDAS. (© 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)