Transport phenomena in porous media / Phénomène de transport en milieux poreux

Porous media are ubiquitous in our common life : typically, the soil, our skin, our clothes, the coffee filters ... exhibit non-homogeneous properties (their porosity) which allow various fluids to flow across the solid matrix. Exploiting the porous properties of these materials is also frequent in the industry. Indeed, they are present in many application fields such as the forming of composite materials, clean motor devices, filtration systems, oil extraction, mixing devices, biological tissue substitution, etc. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the transport phenomena associated with a wide class of flows in porous media and to analyse more deeply the associated physical effects, as represented by the medium permeability and mechanical dispersion tensors. The present work has been carried out following a three-step strategy. Firstly, we have investigated the theory of transport in porous media and we have developed continuous and micro-macro physical models to represent the principal macroscopic flow effects taking into account the associated application conditions. Then we have studied the numerical solution of the resulting system while an experimental device has been set up in order to validate the entire strategy and the obtained simulation results. Finally, as applications of our developments, we have investigated some industrial flows pertaining to Liquid Moulding Technologies, and also the behaviour of cartilage as a porous medium, with a final comparison of numerical and experimental results.