Darcy's law

Darcy's law relates fluid flow through a porous medium to the pressure gradient, fluid viscosity, and medium permeability. It describes flow in the regime where the relation between flow and pressure gradient is approximately linear.

Hydraulic conductivity: A measure of how readily a porous material transmits a particular fluid under a hydraulic gradient. It combines intrinsic permeability with fluid properties to express Darcy flow for a given fluid.
Porous medium: A solid material containing interconnected or isolated void spaces that can hold fluids. Darcy's law models bulk flow through the void space of such materials.
Groundwater flow: The movement of water through saturated soil and rock beneath Earth's surface. Darcy's law is the standard constitutive relation in many groundwater-flow models.
Forchheimer equation: A porous-flow relation that adds a nonlinear inertial term to Darcy's law. It accounts for inertial effects when flow no longer scales linearly with pressure gradient.
Henry Darcy: A French engineer whose 1856 experiments established a quantitative relation for water flow through sand. His filtration experiments supplied the empirical basis for the law bearing his name.
Intrinsic permeability: A property of a porous material that measures its capacity to transmit fluid, independent of the fluid's properties. It is the material-specific factor in Darcy's relation.
Darcy flux: Volumetric flow rate divided by the total cross-sectional area of a porous medium. This bulk-area velocity is the flow quantity commonly related to the pressure gradient.
Darcy–Buckingham law: An extension of Darcy's law that describes water flow through unsaturated porous media. It adapts the pressure-driven relation to soils with partially filled pores.
Brinkman equation: A porous-flow equation that augments Darcy drag with a viscous diffusion term. It can represent shear effects near boundaries that Darcy's law omits.
Dijon water supply: The nineteenth-century engineering system built to supply the French city of Dijon with clean water. Darcy investigated sand filtration for this project, generating the observations behind his law.

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