Nonisothermal Richards flow in porous media with cross diffusion

Abstract

The existence of large-data weak entropy solutions to a nonisothermal immiscible compressible two-phase unsaturated flow model in porous media is proved. The model is thermodynamically consistent and includes temperature gradients and cross-diffusion effects. Due to the fact that some terms from the total energy balance are non-integrable in the classical weak sense, we consider so-called variational entropy solutions. A priori estimates are derived from the entropy balance and the total energy balance. The compactness is achieved by using the Div-Curl lemma.