Stabilizing Fluid-Fluid Displacements in Porous Media Through Wettability Alteration
By M. Trojer, Michael L. Szulczewski, Ruben Juanes. 2015
175 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study experimentally how wettability impacts fluid-fluid-displacement patterns in granular media. We inject a low-viscosity fluid (air) into a thin bed of glass beads initially saturated with a more-viscous fluid (a water-glycerol mixture). Chemical treatment of glass surfaces allows us to control the wetting properties of the medium and modify the contact angle θ from 5° (drainage) to 120° (imbibition). We demonstrate that wettability exerts a powerful influence on the invasion morphology of unfavorable mobility displacements: increasing θ stabilizes fluid invasion into the granular pack at all capillary numbers. In particular, we report the striking observation of a stable radial displacement at low capillary numbers, whose origin lies on the cooperative nature of fluid invasion at the pore scale.
Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Environmental Engineering, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/871350ee6488e9e8557911d51ac9df639309e7e9
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In Environmental Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Wettability and Flow Rate Impacts on Immiscible Displacement: A Theoretical Model (2018, methodology): “…2016; Jamaloei et al., 2012), it cannot quantitatively account for the impact of wettability on the immiscible displacement patterns in porous media (Trojer et al., 2015) because accurate scaling of capillary displacement with cos 𝜃 is strictly limited to straight capillaries (Anderson, 1986;…”
- Visualizing and quantifying the crossover from capillary fingering to viscous fingering in a rough fracture (2017, background): “, 2015b, 2015a] and wettability [Chaudhary et al., 2013; Holtzman and Segre, 2015; Trojer et al., 2015; Jung et al., 2016; Zhao et al., 2016], the phase diagram just provides a qualitative representation of the displacement patterns [Zhang et al.”