On boundedness and growth of unsteady solutions under the double porosity/permeability model

Abstract: There is a recent surge in research activities on modeling the flow of fluids in porous media with complex pore-networks. A prominent mathematical model, which describes the flow of incompressible fluids in porous media with two dominant pore-networks allowing mass transfer across them, is the double porosity/permeability (DPP) model. However, we currently do not have a complete understanding of unsteady solutions under the DPP model. Also, because of the complex nature of the mathematical model, it is not possible to find analytical solutions, and one has to resort to numerical solutions. It is therefore desirable to have a procedure that can serve as a measure to assess the veracity of numerical solutions. In this paper, we establish that unsteady solutions under the transient DPP model are stable in the sense of Lyapunov. We also show that the unsteady solutions grow at most linear with time. These results not only have a theoretical value but also serve as valuable a posteriori measures to verify numerical solutions in the transient setting and under anisotropic medium properties, as analytical solutions are scarce for these scenarios under the DPP model.