An efficient numerical model for liquid water uptake in porous material and its parameter estimation
For researchers in porous media transport, this provides a more efficient numerical method for modeling liquid uptake, but the contribution is incremental as it applies an existing scheme to a known problem.
The study proposes an efficient numerical model using the Scharfetter-Gummel scheme for capillary adsorption in porous materials, demonstrating improved accuracy, relaxed stability, and reduced computational cost, validated against experimental brick data.
The goal of this study is to propose an efficient numerical model for the predictions of capillary adsorption phenomena in a porous material. The Scharfetter-Gummel numerical scheme is proposed to solve an advection-diffusion equation with gravity flux. Its advantages such as accuracy, relaxed stability condition, and reduced computational cost are discussed along with the study of linear and nonlinear cases. The reliability of the numerical model is evaluated by comparing the numerical predictions with experimental observations of liquid uptake in bricks. A parameter estimation problem is solved to adjust the uncertain coefficients of moisture diffusivity and hydraulic conductivity.