Mobilization of a trapped non-wetting fluid from a three-dimensional porous medium

By S. Datta, Terizhandur S. Ramakrishnan, David A. Weitz. 2014

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use confocal microscopy to directly visualize the formation and complex morphologies of trapped non-wetting fluid ganglia within a model 3D porous medium. The wetting fluid continues to flow around the ganglia after they form; this flow is characterized by a capillary number, Ca. We find that the ganglia configurations do not vary for small Ca; by contrast, as Ca is increased above a threshold value, the largest ganglia start to become mobilized and are ultimately removed from the medium. By combining our 3D visualization with measurements of the bulk transport, we show that this behavior can be quantitatively understood by balancing the viscous forces exerted on the ganglia with the pore-scale capillary forces that keep them trapped within the medium. Our work thus helps elucidate the fluid dynamics underlying the mobilization of a trapped non-wetting fluid from a 3D porous medium.

Subfields: Mechanics of Materials, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a70e42e4906baebe8517f74dced63d5622a34fa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Mechanics of Materials

1. S. Berg
2. Christoph H. Arns
3. A. Herring
4. Ryan T. Armstrong
5. Zhishang Liu

In Ocean Engineering

1. S. Berg
2. Ryan T. Armstrong
3. Zhishang Liu
4. A. Herring
5. Christoph H. Arns
6. Martin J. Blunt

Citations in the corpus

• Pore-Scale Characterization of Two-Phase Flow Using Integral Geometry (2017, background): “However, it is the underlying phase morphological characteristics that influence phase permeability and these characteristics for two-phase flow are still being discovered (Khayrat and Jenny 2016; Datta et al. 2014a, b; Schlüter et al. 2016).”