About the applicability of the theory of porous media for the modelling of non‐isothermal material injection into porous structures

Abstract

In this contribution we investigate the relevance of the theory of porous media for the non-isothermal modelling of material injection into porous structures. In particular, we provide a model describing the injection of cement during percutaneous vertebroplasty, which is derived by consistently following the theory of porous media. We demonstrate numerically that this model elicits unphysical behaviour under local thermal non-equilibrium conditions. No distinct unphysical behaviour is observed under local thermal equilibrium conditions. We conclude that heuristic modifications of the model equations are necessary and suspect the unphysical behaviour to be caused by contradictory modelling assumptions.