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Controlling Capillary Fingering Using Pore Size Gradients in Disordered Media by Lu, Nancy B.; Browne, Christopher A.; Amchin, Daniel B.; Nunes, Janine K.; Datta, Sujit S. is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Controlling Capillary Fingering Using Pore Size Gradients in Disordered Media about?

Capillary fingering is a displacement process that can occur when a non-wetting fluid displaces a wetting fluid from a homogeneous disordered porous medium. Here, we investigate how this process is influenced by a pore size gradient. Using microfluidic experiments and computational pore-network models, we show that the non-wetting fluid displacement behavior depends sensitively on the direction and the magnitude of the gradient. The fluid displacement depends on the competition between a pore size gradient and pore-scale disorder; indeed, a sufficiently large gradient can completely suppress capillary fingering. By analyzing capillary forces at the pore scale, we identify a non-dimensional parameter that describes the physics underlying these diverse flow behaviors. Our results thus expand the understanding of flow in complex porous media, and suggest a new way to control flow behavior via the introduction of pore size gradients.

Author

Lu, Nancy B.; Browne, Christopher A.; Amchin, Daniel B.; Nunes, Janine K.; Datta, Sujit S.

Published

2019

Language

EN