Convective Heat Transfer in Porous Media

Fundamental and applied research in flow and convective heat transfer in porous media has received increased attention among researchers in academia and industry during the past several decades. This is due to the importance of this research field in plethora engineering applications, which can be modelled as a porous media or utilise a porous material for different applications. These include geographical application (i.e. enhanced geothermal system and carbon storage), biological systems, solar thermal systems, metal foam heat exchangers, porous burners, transpiration cooling for aerospace systems, thermal management for electronic devices and polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC). Other example for applications include drying technology, catalytic reactors, tissue replacement, drug delivery, advanced medical imaging and porous scaffolds for tissue engineering.

These wide range of ironic applications encourage us to work and research in this field for years, through which we earned loads of information about convective heat transfer in porous materials. After research for years in this field we found that although there are abundance of mathematical, numerical and experimental methods and approaches performed in the field of convection in porous media and they have been included by the existing books and publications in this matter, certain new found and significant phenomena, advanced applications, convection in miniaturized geometries, experimental challenges and interesting numerical approaches have not been yet included by present books. So that, this book tries to present and discuss these new found phenomena with the most concentration on the practical approaches and their advanced applications.