A phase-field approach to model evaporation from porous media: Modeling and upscaling

Abstract

We develop a phase-field model for evaporation from a porous medium by explicitly considering a vapor component together with the liquid and gas phases in the system. The phase-field model consists of the conservation of mass (for phases and vapor component), momentum, and energy. In addition, the evolution of the phase field is described by the Allen–Cahn equation. In the limit of vanishing interface width, matched asymptotic expansions reveal that the phase-field model reduces to the sharp-interface model with all the relevant transmission conditions on the moving interface. An energy estimate is derived, which suggests that for the diffusion-dominated regime, energy always decreases with time. However, this is not trivial in the case of other regimes. Through numerical examples, we analyze the efficiency of the developed phase-field formulation in modeling the evaporation process. We observe that our formulation is able to capture shrinking liquid droplet, in other words evaporation. Further, the phase-field model is upscaled to the Darcy scale using periodic homogenization for the diffusion-dominated regime. The effective parameters at the Darcy scale are connected to the pore scale through corresponding cell problems.