The radially outward flow of fluid into a porous medium occurs in many practical problems, from transport across vascular walls to the pressurization of boreholes. As the driving pressure becomes non-negligible relative to the stiffness of the solid structure, the poromechanical coupling between the fluid and the solid has an increasingly strong impact on the flow. For very large pressures or very soft materials, as is the case for hydraulic fracturing and arterial flows, this coupling can lead to large deformations and, hence, to strong deviations from a classical, linear-poroelastic response. Here, we study this problem by analysing the steady-state response of a poroelastic cylinder to fluid injection. We consider the qualitative and quantitative impacts of kinematic and constitutive nonlinearity, highlighting the strong impact of deformation-dependent permeability. We show that the wall thickness (thick versus thin) and the outer boundary condition (free versus constrained) play a central role in controlling the mechanics.

The radially outward flow of fluid through a porous medium occurs in many practical problems, from transport across vascular walls to the pressurization of boreholes in the subsurface. When the driving pressure is non-negligible relative to the stiffness of the solid structure, the poromechanical coupling between the fluid and the solid can control both the steady state and the transient mechanics of the system. Very large pressures or very soft materials lead to large deformations of the solid skeleton, which introduce kinematic and constitutive nonlinearity that can have a non-trivial impact on these mechanics. Here, we study the transient response of a poroelastic cylinder to sudden fluid injection. We consider the impacts of kinematic and constitutive nonlinearity, both separately and in combination, and we highlight the central role of driving method in the evolution of the response. We show that the various facets of nonlinearity may either accelerate or decelerate the transient response relative to linear poroelasticity, depending on the boundary conditions and the initial geometry, and that an imposed fluid pressure leads to a much faster response than an imposed fluid flux.

Flow-induced failure of granular materials is relevant to a broad range of geomechanical applications.Plasticity, which is the inherent failure mechanism of most granular materials, enables large deformations that can invalidate linearised models. Motivated by fluid injection into a borehole, we develop a steady-state model for the large deformation of a thick-walled, partially-permeable, elastic-perfectly-plastic annulus with a pressurised inner cavity. We account for pre-existing compressive stresses, as would be present in the subsurface, by subtracting a compressed initial state from our solutions to provide the additional disturbance due to fluid injection. We also introduce a simple parameter that allows for a smooth transition from an impermeable material (i.e., subject to mechanical loading at the inner wall) to a fully permeable material (i.e., subject to an internal pore-pressure gradient), which would be relevant to coated boreholes and very-low-permeability materials. We focus on the difference between poroelastic and poroelasto-plastic deformations, the role of kinematic and constitutive nonlinearity, and the transition from impermeable to fully permeable. We find that plasticity can enable much larger deformations while predicting much smaller stresses. The former makes model choice increasingly important in the plastic region, while the elastic region remains insensitive to these changes. We also find that, for a fixed total stress at the inner wall, materials experience larger deformations and generally larger stresses as they transition from impermeable to fully permeable.

A major challenge in flow through porous media is to better understand the link between microstructure and macroscale flow and transport. For idealised microstructures, the mathematical framework of homogenisation theory can be used for this purpose. Here, we consider a two-dimensional microstructure comprising an array of obstacles of smooth but arbitrary shape, the size and spacing of which can vary along the length of the porous medium. We use homogenisation via the method of multiple scales to systematically upscale a novel problem involving cells of varying area to obtain effective continuum equations for macroscale flow and transport. The equations are characterised by the local porosity, a local anisotropic flow permeability, an effective local anisotropic solute diffusivity and an effective local adsorption rate. These macroscale properties depend non-trivially on the two degrees of microstructural geometric freedom in our problem: obstacle size and obstacle spacing. We exploit this dependence to construct and compare scenarios where the same porosity profile results from different combinations of obstacle size and spacing. We focus on a simple example geometry comprising circular obstacles on a rectangular lattice, for which we numerically determine the macroscale permeability and effective diffusivity. We investigate scenarios where the porosity is spatially uniform but the permeability and diffusivity are not. Our results may be useful in the design of filters or for studying the impact of deformation on transport in soft porous media.

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