Myron B. Allen, III - The Mathematics of Fluid Flow Through Porous Media

More specifically, any part of a body occupying a region in three‐dimensional space can experience forces acting on the region's bounding surface . We account for these forces by introducing tractions, having dimension force per unit area:

Consider such a region, as drawn in Figure 2.6. At any point where the bounding surface is smooth and orientable, there exists an outward pointing unit normal vector that is orthogonal to the plane tangent to at that point. The stress tensor is a linear transformation such that the vector field gives the traction at any point on . The vector field need not be collinear with : The force per unit area acting at a point on can have a component tangent to the surface. The total force acting on is

having dimension .

Four additional remarks help clarify the nature of the stress tensor.

1 With respect to any orthonormal basis , any linear transformation has a matrix representation with entries . For , this representation has the form Figure 2.6 A region in three‐dimensional space with unit outward normal vector field and the traction acting on the boundary .

2 In accordance with Exercise 2.4, with respect to any orthonormal basis, the diagonal entries represent forces per unit area acting in directions perpendicular to faces that are orthogonal to , , and , respectively. We refer to these entries as tensile stresses when they pull in the same direction as and as compressive stresses when they push in the opposite direction—namely inward—from . The off‐diagonal entries , where , are shear stresses.

3 A classic theorem in continuum mechanics reduces the angular momentum balance, which we do not discuss here, to the identity with respect to any orthonormal basis. In other words, the stress tensor is symmetric. See [4, Chapter 4] for details.

4 With respect to an orthonormal basis , the divergence of the tensor‐valued function has the following representation as a vector‐valued function:

Exercise 2.4 Consider the action of on each unit basis vector , , to examine the forces acting on faces of a cube of material whose edges lie parallel to the Cartesian coordinate axes defined by , as drawn in Figure 2.7. Justify the assertion that represents the th component of the force per unit area acting on surfaces that lie perpendicular to .

Figure 2.7 A cube of material illustrating the interpretations of entries of the stress tensor matrix with respect to an orthonormal basis, from [4, page 109].

The differential momentum balance (2.9)generalizes Newton's second law of motion. The left side of Eq. (2.9)is proportional to mass acceleration, while the right side is proportional to a sum of forces. Thus, Eq. (2.9)has the form

Based on this parallel, fluid mechanicians call

the inertial terms.

If we view the momentum balance as an equation for the velocity , the inertial terms make the momentum balance a nonlinear PDE. In many applications to fluid mechanics, this nonlinearity wreaks mathematical havoc. Mercifully, for reasons examined in Chapter 3, the inertial nonlinearity plays a negligible role in the most commonly used models of porous‐media flow. However, this observation furnishes scant grounds for complacency. As subsequent chapters demonstrate, other types of nonlinearity play prominent roles in the fluid mechanics of porous media.