NONEQUILIBRIUM STATISTICAL-MECHANICAL DERIVATION OF A NONLOCAL DARCY LAW FOR UNSATURATED SATURATED FLOW

As illustrated variously by wetting and drying scanning curves, flow in unsaturated porous media is inherently nonlocal. This nonlocality is also manifest in hysteresis in the classical Darcy conductivity. It is the authors' belief that most current theories of unsaturated/saturated flow are often inadequate, as they do not account for spatial nonlocality and memory. Here we provide a fundamental theory in which nonlocality of the flow constitutive theory is a natural consequence of force balances. The results are derived from general principles in statistical physics and under appropriate limiting conditions, the classical Darcy's Law is recovered for saturated flow. A notable departure in this theory from other nonlocal flow theories is that a classical Darcy type equation on a small scale need not exist.