TRANSPORT IN ORDERED AND DISORDERED POROUS-MEDIA .3. CLOSURE AND COMPARISON BETWEEN THEORY AND EXPERIMENT

In this paper we examine the closure problem associated with the volume averaged form of the Stokes equations presented in Part II. For both ordered and disordered porous media, we make use of a spatially periodic model of a porous medium. Under these circumstances the closure problem, in terms of the closure variables, is independent of the weighting functions used in the spatial smoothing process. Comparison between theory and experiment suggests that the geometrical characteristics of the unit cell dominate the calculated value of the Darcy's law permeability tensor, whereas the periodic conditions required for the local form of the closure problem play only a minor role.