Related papers: Forced Imbibition in Stratified Porous Media
Imbibition, the displacement of a nonwetting fluid by a wetting fluid, plays a central role in diverse energy, environmental, and industrial processes. While this process is typically studied in homogeneous porous media with uniform…
We show that when a non-wetting fluid drains a stratified porous medium at sufficiently small capillary numbers Ca, it flows only through the coarsest stratum of the medium; by contrast, above a threshold Ca, the non-wetting fluid is also…
Imbibition is a commonly encountered multiphase problem in various fields, and exact prediction of imbibition processes is a key issue for better understanding capillary flow in heterogeneous porous media. In this work, a numerical…
Spontaneous imbibition has been receiving much attention due to its significance in many subsurface and industrial applications. Unveiling pore-scale wetting dynamics, and particularly its upscaling to the Darcy scale are still unresolved.…
We establish a comprehensive description of the patterns formed when a wetting liquid displaces a viscous fluid confined in a porous medium. Building on model microfluidic experiments, we evidence four imbibition scenarios all yielding…
A deep understanding of two-phase displacement in porous media with permeability contrast is essential for the design and optimisation of enhanced oil recovery processes. In this paper, we investigate the forced imbibition behaviour in two…
We report an approach to fully visualize the flow of two immiscible fluids through a model three-dimensional (3D) porous medium at pore-scale resolution. Using confocal microscopy, we directly image the drainage of the medium by the…
Traditional approaches to mathematically describe spontaneous imbibition are usually based on either macro-scale models, such as Richards equation, or simplified pore-scale models, such as the bundle of capillary tubes (BCTM) or…
Immiscible fluid displacement in porous media is fundamental for many environmental processes, including infiltration of water in soils, groundwater remediation, enhanced recovery of hydrocarbons and carbon geosequestration. Microstructural…
The physics of liquids in porous media gives rise to many interesting phenomena, including imbibition where a viscous fluid displaces a less viscous one. Here we discuss the theoretical and experimental progress made in recent years in this…
When a very thin capillary is inserted into a liquid, the liquid is sucked into it: this imbibition process is controlled by a balance of capillary and drag forces, which are hard to quantify experimentally, in particularly considering flow…
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…
Forcing hydrophilic fluids through hydrophobic porous solids is a recurrent industrial challenge. If the penetrating fluid is Newtonian, the imposed pressure has to overcome the capillary pressure at the fluid-air interface in a pore. The…
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 present a theoretical study of spontaneous imbibition of liquid 4He in silica aerogels focusing on the effect of porosity on the fluid dynamical behavior. We adopt a coarse-grained three-dimensional lattice-gas description like in…
Microfluidic devices offer unique opportunities to directly observe multiphase flow in porous media. However, as a direct representation of flow in geological pore networks, conventional microfluidics face several challenges. One is that…
A fundamental variable characterizing immiscible two-phase flow in porous media is the wetting saturation, which is the ratio between the pore volume filled with wetting fluid and the total pore volume. More generally, this variable comes…
Periodic forcing of flow in compressible porous media is an important driver for solute dispersion and mixing in geological and engineered porous media subject for example to tides, pumping and recharge cycles, or fluid injection and…
We revisit the classical problem of liquid imbibition in a single pore with spatially varying wettability. Starting from the Lucas-Washburn equation, we derive analytical solutions for the imbibition time (crossing time) in systems where…
We use confocal microscopy to directly visualize the spatial fluctuations in fluid flow through a three-dimensional porous medium. We find that the velocity magnitudes and the velocity components both along and transverse to the imposed…