Related papers: Bistability in the Unstable Flow of Polymer Soluti…
Diverse processes rely on the viscous flow of polymer solutions through porous media. In many cases, the macroscopic flow resistance abruptly increases above a threshold flow rate in a porous medium---but not in bulk solution. The reason…
Many environmental, energy, and industrial processes involve the flow of polymer solutions in three-dimensional (3D) porous media where fluid is confined to navigate through complex pore space geometries. As polymers are transported through…
Diverse chemical, energy, environmental, and industrial processes involve the flow of polymer solutions in porous media. The accumulation and dissipation of elastic stresses as the polymers are transported through the tortuous, confined…
Polymer solutions are frequently used in enhanced oil recovery and groundwater remediation to improve the recovery of trapped non-aqueous fluids. However, applications are limited by an incomplete understanding of the flow in porous media.…
We study experimentally the interfacial instability between a layer of dilute polymer solution and water flowing in a thin capillary. The use of microfluidic devices allows us to observe and quantify in great detail the features of the…
Polymer solutions exhibit anomalous flow thickening -- marked by an abrupt increase in the macroscopic flow resistance -- above a threshold flow rate in a porous medium, but not in bulk solution. This phenomenon has evaded a mechanistic…
Turbulent flows have been used for millennia to mix solutes; a familiar example is stirring cream into coffee. However, many energy, environmental, and industrial processes rely on the mixing of solutes in porous media where confinement…
Fluid transport in microfluidic systems typically is laminar due to the low Reynolds number characteristic of the flow. The inclusion of suspended polymers imparts elasticity to fluids, allowing instabilities to be excited when substantial…
Microscale turbulent flow in porous media is conducive to the development of flow instabilities due to strong vortical and shearing flow occurring within the pore space. When the flow instabilities around individual solid obstacles interact…
In the last decades, significant progress has been made in understanding the multiphase displacement through porous media with homogeneous wettability and its relation to the pore geometry. However, the role of wettability at the scale of…
Direct numerical simulations are used to elucidate the interplay of wettability and fluid viscosities on immiscible fluid displacements in a heterogeneous porous medium.We classify the flow regimes based using qualitative and quantitative…
We study the displacement of three immiscible Stokes fluids with constant viscosities in a porous medium. The middle-layer fluid is contained in a bounded region. We give an analysis of the linear stability of this process. This stability…
Fluid flow through bimodal porous media, characterized by a distinct separation in pore size distribution, is critical in various scientific and engineering applications, including groundwater management, oil and gas production, and carbon…
Solutions of long, flexible polymer molecules are complex fluids that simultaneously exhibit fluid-like and solid-like behaviour. When subjected to an external flow, dilute polymer solutions exhibit elastic turbulence - a unique, chaotic…
It is presently believed that flows of viscoelastic polymer solutions in geometries such as a straight pipe or channel are linearly stable. Here we present experimental evidence that such flows can be nonlinearly unstable and can exhibit a…
We show that viscoelastic plane Poiseuille flow becomes linearly unstable in the absence of inertia, in the limit of high elasticities, for ultra-dilute polymer solutions. While inertialess elastic instabilities have been predicted for…
Elastic turbulence is a chaotic flow state observed in dilute polymer solutions in the absence of inertia. It was discovered experimentally in circular geometries and has long been thought to require a finite amplitude perturbation in…
Many key environmental, industrial, and energy processes rely on controlling fluid transport within subsurface porous media. These media are typically structurally heterogeneous, often with vertically-layered strata of distinct…
Turbulence is one of the most fascinating phenomena in nature and one of the biggest challenges for modern physics. It is common knowledge that a flow of a simple, Newtonian fluid is likely to be turbulent, when velocity is high, viscosity…
When immiscible wetting and non-wetting fluids move in parallel in a porous medium, an instability may occur at sufficiently high capillary numbers so that interfaces between the fluids initially held in place by the porous medium are…