On flow of a heat conducting fluid through a porous medium

Summary . A two-space singular perturbation technique is employed to derive approximate governing equations for flow of a viscous heat-conducting fluid through a rigid porous solid. It is assumed that buoyancy forces are significant, and it is shown that standard approximations used in the study of flow through a porous medium are valid provided that Gr ? 1, where Gr is a Grashof number calculated using a typical pore radius as the length scale. Results previously derived in the literature for flow through an isotropic random array of spherical particles are used to show how the permeability and conductivity tensors can be calculated for a problem of interest in planetary science.