From connected pathway flow to ganglion dynamics

By M. Rücker, Steffen Berg, Ryan T. Armstrong, A. Georgiadis, H. Ott, Alexander Gerhard Schwing, R. Neiteler, N. Brussee, A. Makurat, L. Leu and 4 more. 2015

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During imbibition, initially connected oil is displaced until it is trapped as immobile clusters. While initial and final states have been well described before, here we image the dynamic transient process in a sandstone rock using fast synchrotron‐based X‐ray computed microtomography. Wetting film swelling and subsequent snap off, at unusually high saturation, decreases nonwetting phase connectivity, which leads to nonwetting phase fragmentation into mobile ganglia, i.e., ganglion dynamics regime. We find that in addition to pressure‐driven connected pathway flow, mass transfer in the oil phase also occurs by a sequence of correlated breakup and coalescence processes. For example, meniscus oscillations caused by snap‐off events trigger coalescence of adjacent clusters. The ganglion dynamics occurs at the length scale of oil clusters and thus represents an intermediate flow regime between pore and Darcy scale that is so far dismissed in most upscaling attempts.

Subfields: Analytical Chemistry, Mechanics of Materials, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ef23ac385f107c55991b274500371371f8ee312

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In Mechanics of Materials

In Ocean Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Pore‐scale displacement mechanisms as a source of hysteresis for two‐phase flow in porous media (2016, methodology): “During imbibition, in turn, the NWP loops that do exist around grains are maintained for a while when Sw increases and are only gradually removed through snap-off at pore constrictions everywhere in the sample [R€ucker et al., 2015b].”
Pore-Scale Characterization of Two-Phase Flow Using Integral Geometry (2017, methodology): “The flow cell was designed for dynamic experiments, the details of which can be found in a few of our recent publications (Berg et al. 2013, 2014; Armstrong et al. 2014a; Rücker et al. 2015).”