A systematic approximation for the equations governing convection–diffusion in a porous medium

In order to take into account thermal effects in flows through porous media, one makes ad hoc modifications to Darcy’s equation by appending a term that is similar to the one that is obtained in the Oberbeck–Boussinesq approximation for a fluid. In this short paper we outline a systematic procedure for obtaining an Oberbeck–Boussinesq type of approximation for the flow of a fluid through a porous medium. In addition to establishing the appropriate equation for a flow governed by Darcy’s equation, we proceed to obtain the approximations for flows governed by equations due to Forchheimer and Brinkman.