Dual-Porosity Models And Their Use In Biological Tissue Electroporation

The paper reviews the theoretical aspects of dual-porosity models and their use in plant and animal tissue electroporation. Models of a multiple porosity are mostly used in the research of soils, porous rocks, and aquifers to mathematically determine the transport (seepage) of a liquid or gaseous medium through their porous structures driven by the law of the pressure differential. There are, however, several other fields dealing with multiple porosity, where such models could be efficiently applied. Two such fields are electrical and biomedical engineering. In the former, the models could be used for study of porous metallic foams, applied in high-efficiency energy storage (fuel cells), and in the latter to solve the issue of mass and heat transfer in electroporated tissue. Biological tissue (composed of cells and the extracellular space), behaves more or less as a material of a variable porosity governed by the properties of the extracellular space, and of the membrane. The paper provides a theoretical background to viewing biological tissue as a material of a variable porosity and investigates the possibility of using dual-porosity models to understand to what extent electroporation of the cell membrane affects the thermal conductivity of biological tissue.