Customer Reviews

The Method of Volume Averaging (Theory and Applications of Transport in Porous Media)

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This book is essentially about deriving the governing equations for phenomena happening during saturated flow in a porous medium. This book does not have any applications such as ground water flow or oil production. If you are interested in a more general book on porous media, the classic books by Jacob Bear or Sheidegger or Dullien will be your best bet.

Generally the volume averaging method is quite involved and not easy to follow. Though the book is supposed to be for undergraduates, it is actually a graduate-level text. (I use it for my graduate level course on porous media.) This is classic Whitaker prose--very clear, easy to follow, and rigorous. It is a pleasure to read this book, especially if you don't like the various formulas thrown at you as in monographs, and would like to derive all the equations yourself. A very nice description of the closure problem (i.e., how the macroscopic variables are linked to the microscopic variables within an REV) in porous media. This is really the first step--a good preparation for more advanced work by Whitaker and Quintard on the flow of multicomponent liquids in a porous medium. In my opinion, this book also has one of the best theoretical derivations of the Darcy's law.

Soy investigador en el tema de inyección en medios Porosos. Este libro es la recopilación perfecta de este tema. He tenido la oportunidad de leer los artículo previos escritos por Whitaker y este libro es una gran recopilacion del autor y el punto de partida para todos aquellos Investigadores que desean consolidar las bases en el tema de Fenómenos de Transporte en Medios Porosos. Se los recomiendo a todos los lectores.

The book presents the technique of volume averaging, largely developed by the author, and which is one of many available techniques of treating effective media (other notable method you may have heard of is homogenization theory - see, e.g., Gregoire Allaire or Bensoussan or Torquato). This book is written with the undergraduate in mind, so contains a lot of problems, exercises, and tons of details needed to explain all the calculations done. It is a highly pedagogical book, especially remarkable, given that most of the books written on effective medium theory are mostly monographs, and not really accessible to the undergraduate students. This one is well written, and fairly easy to follow. One complaint I have is that the calculations are so long that it takes a very long time to get through chapters. My other complaint is that I would like to see more in the way of computational methods and their role/contribution to the field, as we know the computation of effective properties cannot be done analytically, so computational methods are really important for a good understanding. This books contains zero information on this topic, and as a result, is mostly a huge collection of formulas, and can be hard to read after you've ploughed through the first 100 pages. Anyways that's my opinion and books can't all please everyone, but as a pedagogical text, it is very good, that my impression is a very good one.

As the information about this book states, it is designed for an undergraduate course. It is not realy suited for postgraduate work. I have found other texts which are easier to follow regarding volume averaging, such as Transport Phenomena in Multiphase Systems by Faghri and Zhang.