Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Environmental Science

First Advisor

Dr. Fathi M. Allan

Second Advisor

Dr. Ali Mohammed Sayfy

Third Advisor

Dr. Saud Khashan

Comments

Recently, a great deal of interest has been focused on the investigation of transport phenomenon in disordered systems. In particular, fluid flow through porous media has attracted much attention due to its importance in several technological processes such as filtration, catalysis, chromatography, and spread of hazardous wastes, petroleum exploration, and recovery. Furthermore, flow through porous media is an important environmental problem that has environmental implications in several areas such as the study of pollution, fate of contaminants, contaminations issues related to agriculture, civil constructions, coastal management, and many more.

In this thesis, the fluid flow through multi-layers porous media is investigated. A mathematical model for the flow velocities is set to describe the flow through these different layers, together with initial and boundary conditions. More attention is made to the velocity profiles at the interface. The model is then solved with two different methods, the shooting method and the finite difference method. We consider a finite width three porous layer problem, where the layers have different permeability values which introduce a discontinuity in the permeability at the interface region. At the interface the continuity of the velocity and shear stress are imposed. A comparison between the nonlinear shooting method and the finite difference approach is then made and it shows that the shooting method is more accurate and more efficient.

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