Abstract
In this study, we develop a numerical analysis method to investigate the characteristics of heat conduction in unsaturated porous media. In particular, we propose a numerical modeling technique to investigate the overall thermal conductivity of unsaturated porous media taking into account the pore structure filled partially or fully with water. Specifically, a predetermined amount of pore water is arranged to minimize the interfacial free energy in a porous structure created by arranging solid phase particles randomly. We set the solid phase and the liquid phase region by the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method and efficiently generate models from a small set of input data. Moreover, we investigate the relationship between water content and macro thermal conductivity by analyzing thermal conductivity of numerical unsaturated porous media models. As the result, we clarified that regularity of solid phase particle arrangement and uniformity of particle size affect the change behavior of macro thermal conductivity in low saturation region thereby demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed method.
