Fractionalization of Forchheimer’s correction to Darcy’s law in porous media in large deformations

This work presents a theoretical and numerical study of the flow of the interstitial fluid saturating a porous medium, principally aimed at modeling a bio-mimetic material and assumed to experience a dynamic regime different from the Darcian one, as is typically hypothesized in biomechanical scenarios. The main aspect of our research is the conjecture according to which, for a particular mechanical state of the porous medium, the fluid exhibits two types of deviation from Darcy’s law. One is due to the inertial forces characterizing the pore scale dynamics of the fluid. This aspect can be resolved by turning to the Forchheimer correction to Darcy’s law, which introduces non-linearities in the relationship between the fluid filtration velocity and the dissipative forces describing the interactions between the fluid and the solid matrix. The second source of discrepancies from classical Darcy’s law emerges, for example, when pore scale disturbances to the flow, such as obstructions of the fluid path or clogging of the pores, result in a time delay between drag force and filtration velocity. Recently, models have been proposed in which such delay is described through constitutive laws featuring fractional operators. Whereas, to the best of our knowledge, the aforementioned behaviors have been studied separately or in small deformations, we present a model of fluid flow in a deformable porous medium undergoing large deformations in which the fluid motion obeys a fractionalized Forchheimer’s correction. After reviewing Forchheimer’s formulation, we present a fractionalization of the Darcy–Forchheimer law, and we explain the numerical procedure adopted to solve the highly non-linear boundary value problem resulting from the presence of the two considered deviations from the Darcian regime. We complete our study by highlighting the way in which the fractional order of the model tunes the magnitude of the pore pressure and fluid filtration velocity.