Interface pinning of immiscible gravity-exchange flows in porous media
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Juanes_Interface pinning.pdf
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Author(s)
Zhao, Benzhong
MacMinn, Christopher W.
Szulczewski, Michael Lawrence
Neufeld, Jerome A.
Huppert, Herbert E.
Juanes, Ruben
Date Issued
February 2013
Journal
Physical Review E
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Zhao, Benzhong et al. “Interface Pinning of Immiscible Gravity-exchange Flows in Porous Media.” Physical Review E 87.2 (2013). ©2013 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We study the gravity-exchange flow of two immiscible fluids in a porous medium and show that, in contrast with the miscible case, a portion of the initial interface remains pinned at all times. We elucidate, by means of micromodel experiments, the pore-level mechanism responsible for capillary pinning at the macroscale. We propose a sharp-interface gravity-current model that incorporates capillarity and quantitatively explains the experimental observations, including the x∼t[superscript 1/2] spreading behavior at intermediate times and the fact that capillarity stops a finite-release current. Our theory and experiments suggest that capillary pinning is potentially an important, yet unexplored, trapping mechanism during CO2 sequestration in deep saline aquifers.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.87.023015
