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The problem of two-phase flow in straight capillaries of polygonal cross section displays many of the dynamic characteristics of rapid interfacial motions associated with pore-scale displacements in porous media. Fluid inertia is known to…
The flow of fluids within porous rocks is an important process with numerous applications in Earth sciences. Modeling the compaction-driven fluid flow requires the solution of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations that account…
Conventional measurements of two-phase flow in porous media often use completely immiscible fluids, or are performed over time-scales of days to weeks. If applied to the study of gas storage and recovery, these measurements do not properly…
We calculate the meniscus location in tapered capillaries under the influence of pressure difference and dielectrophoretic forces with and without gravity. We find that the meniscus location can be a discontinuous function of the pressure…
The displacement of a more viscous fluid by a less viscous one in a quasi-two dimensional geometry leads to the formation of complex fingering patterns. This fingering has been characterized by a most unstable wavelength, $\lambda_c$, which…
This study investigates the fingering instability that forms during stretching of capillary suspensions with and without added nanoparticles. The dewetting process is observed using a transparent lifted Hele-Shaw cell. The liquid bridge is…
The finger-like branching pattern that occurs when a less viscous fluid displaces a more viscous one confined between two parallel plates has been widely studied as a classical example of a mathematically-tractable hydrodynamic instability…
We investigate the viscous fingering instability that arises when air is injected from the end of an oil-filled, compliant channel. We show that induced axial and transverse depth gradients foster novel pattern formation. Moreover, the…
The miscible displacement of a shear-thinning fluid by another of same rheological properties is studied experimentally in a transparent fracture by an optical technique imaging relative concentration distributions. The fracture walls have…
The onset of viscous fingering in the presence of a non monotonic viscosity profile is investigated theoretically for two immiscible fluids. Classical fluid dynamics predicts that no unstable behavior may be observed when a viscous fluid…
We report a local analysis of the flow of foams in two dimensional heterogeneous model porous media. Pressure measurements are combined with direct observation in order to determine simultaneously the effective viscosity and the fraction of…
Compressing a porous, fluid-filled material will drive the interstitial fluid out of the pore space, as when squeezing water out of a kitchen sponge. Inversely, injecting fluid into a porous material can deform the solid structure, as when…
We use confocal microscopy to directly visualize the simultaneous flow of both a wetting and a non-wetting fluid through a model three-dimensional (3D) porous medium. We find that, for small flow rates, both fluids flow through unchanging,…
Although capillary and permeability are the two most important physical properties controlling fluid distribution and flow in nature, the interconnectivity function between them was a pressing challenge. Because knowing permeability leads…
A thin water film on a cleaved mica substrate undergoes a first order phase transition between two values of film thickness. By inducing a finite evaporation rate of the water, the interface between the two phases develops a fingering…
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…
The Saffman-Taylor viscous fingering instability occurs when a less viscous fluid displaces a more viscous one between narrowly spaced parallel plates in a Hele-Shaw cell. Experiments in radial flow geometry form fan-like patterns, in which…
We report a new first-order phase transition preceding capillary condensation and corresponding to the discontinuous formation of a curved liquid meniscus. Using a mean-field microscopic approach based on the density functional theory we…
Adding swimming bacteria to a liquid causes its effective shear viscosity to decrease, eventually reaching a regime of zero viscosity. We examined whether this property leads to viscous finger-like displacement fronts like those observed…
This study refutes the premise that the distribution of flow speeds in complex porous media can be described by a simple function such as a normal or exponential variation. In many complex porous media, including those relevant for…