  Air-permeable porous media hosts air within their pores. Upon removal from
the material's interior, these porous media have the tendency to replenish the
air, effectively acting as a suction pump. Therefore, the technique used to
convert a porous media into a pump, consists of degassing the material to
remove their air inside. The suction property when recovering the air, can be
used to move a liquid through a microfluidic channel, studying the dynamics of
the liquid-air front. In this article, we have developed a theoretical
mathematical model that precisely characterize the behavior of this kind of
pumps and the dynamics of the liquid-air front. This model allows us to use
porous media pumps as very accurate devices to move liquids in a completely
controlled way, being able to obtain characteristic properties of fluids such
as viscosity or the pressure applied to them. We have tested it using
experimental data from the literature, and we have been able to observe that
the theory fits satisfactorily with the experiments, being able to affirm that
the model is correctly satisfied. This type of pump is of great interest to the
scientific community because of its small size and the fact that it operates
without any external power source.
