Flow, deformation, and solute transport due to periodic squeezing
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Many natural, industrial, and household systems involve soft porous materials that experience periodic squeezing or compression. Examples include the soil underlying roadways, the cartilage that provides padding between your bones, and the sponge in your kitchen sink. Squeezing these materials will compress the solid skeleton, driving fluid out. Releasing the material will allow the skeleton to expand and relax, pulling fluid back in. The resulting deformation within the material can be either nearly uniform or highly non-uniform, depending on whether the rate of squeezing is slow or fast relative to the material's intrinsic poroelastic timescale — with important implications for the magnitude and sign of the maximum internal stress, and for the distribution of internal flow. The latter, in turn, has important implications for the migration and spreading of solutes within the material.
In this pair of studies, we used a theoretical model to study deformation, flow, and solute transport within a soft porous material during periodic squeezing. We showed that increasing the squeezing amplitude always enhances deformation, flow, and solute transport, whereas increasing the squeezing rate can either increase or decrease transport. Specifically, transport is maximised for an intermediate squeezing period that is comparable to the material's poroelastic timescale.
Read the papers:
- Flow and deformation due to periodic loading in a soft porous material. M Fiori, S Pramanik, and CWM. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 974:A2, 2023. [ doi | pdf | arXiv | codes ]
- Solute transport due to periodic loading in a soft porous material. M Fiori, S Pramanik, and CWM. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 1009:A15, 2025. [ doi | pdf | arXiv | codes ]
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