Signatures of fluid–fluid displacement in porous media: wettability, patterns and pressures
Name
1906.02364.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.35 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2983f1eccb57178ba204f3e1be13e8ea
Author(s)
Primkulov, Bauyrzhan
Pahlavan, Amir A.
Fu, Xiaojing
Zhao, Benzhong
MacMinn, Christopher W.
Juanes, Ruben
Date Issued
July 2019
Journal
Journal of Fluid Mechanics
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Citation
Primkulov, Bauyrzhan K. et al., "Signatures of fluid–fluid displacement in porous media: wettability, patterns and pressures." Journal of Fluid Mechanics 875 (September 2019): no. R4 doi. 10.1017/jfm.2019.554 ©2019 Authors
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We develop a novel 'moving-capacitor' dynamic network model to simulate immiscible fluid-fluid displacement in porous media. Traditional network models approximate the pore geometry as a network of fixed resistors, directly analogous to an electrical circuit. Our model additionally captures the motion of individual fluid-fluid interfaces through the pore geometry by completing this analogy, representing interfaces as a set of moving capacitors. By incorporating pore-scale invasion events, the model reproduces, for the first time, both the displacement pattern and the injection-pressure signal under a wide range of capillary numbers and substrate wettabilities. We show that at high capillary numbers the invading patterns advance symmetrically through viscous fingers. In contrast, at low capillary numbers the flow is governed by the wettability-dependent fluid-fluid interactions with the pore structure. The signature of the transition between the two regimes manifests itself in the fluctuations of the injection-pressure signal. ©2019 Cambridge University Press.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/JFM.2019.554
