Fenômenos de transporte em meios porosos e interfaces fractais

Abstract

In this work, we investigate different transport phenomena through irregular media by means of numerical simulations. Initially, we study the effect of the critical percolation disorder on pore networks under diffusion-reaction conditions. Our results indicate the existence of three distinct regimes of reactivity, determined by the dimensionless parameter E=D/(Kl^2), where D is the molecular diffusivity of the reagent, K is its chemical reaction coefficient, and l is the length scale of the pore. At low values of E, the flux of the reacting species penetrating the network follows the classical scaling behavior, namely F~LE^(1/2). At intermediate values of E, the influence of the fractal morphology of the percolating cluster results in an anomalous behavior, F~L^(A/2)E^B, with an exponent B=0.34. At high values of E, the flux of the reagent reaches a saturation limit, F_SAT, that scales with the system size as F_SAT=L^A, with an exponent A=1.89, corresponding to the fractal dimension of the sample-spanning cluster. In the second part of this work, we study how the irregularity of the geometry influences the sequential deactivation of an interface accessed by diffusion. By using the notion of active zone, we propose a conjecture which constitutes an extension of Makarov theorem. In the third part, we investigate the steady-state heat transport in a fluid flowing through a two-dimensional channel whose walls are irregular interfaces. Once more, we apply the notion of active zone to investigate the effect of the interface geometry on the heat exchange efficiency of the system for different conductive-convective conditions. Compared with the behavior of a channel with smooth interfaces and under conditions in which the mechanism of heat conduction dominates, the results indicate that the effect of roughness is almost negligible on the efficiency of the heat transport system. On the other hand, when the convection becomes dominant, the role of the interface roughness is to generally increase both the heat flux across the wall as well as the active length of heat exchange, when compared with the smooth channel. Finally, we show that this last behavior is closely related with the presence of recirculation zones in the reentrant regions of the fractal geometry.