New paper published!

Manuel and his colleagues paper on the Limitations and Implications of Modeling Heat Transport in Porous Aquifers by Assuming Local Thermal Equilibrium is now published in Water Resources Research. To quantify the occurrence and effects of local thermal disequilibrium during heat transport they systematically compared thermal breakthrough curves from a local thermal equilibrium model with those calculated using a local thermal non-equilibrium model, explicitly allowing for different temperatures in the fluid and solid phases. They showed that, the use of a LTE model can lead to an underestimation of the effective thermal dispersion by a factor of up to 30 or higher, while the advective thermal velocity remains unaffected for most conditions. Based on a regression analysis of the simulation results, they provide a criterion which can be used to determine if LTNE effects are expected for particular conditions.
For more information, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR027772