Capillary Fracturing in Granular Media
Name
Holtzman-2012-Capillary Fracturing in Granular Media.pdf
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295 KB
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Holtzman, Ran
Juanes, Ruben
Szulczewski, Michael Lawrence
Date Issued
June 2012
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Holtzman, Ran, Michael Szulczewski, and Ruben Juanes. “Capillary Fracturing in Granular Media.” Physical Review Letters 108.26 (2012): 264504. © 2012 American Physical Society.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We study the displacement of immiscible fluids in deformable, noncohesive granular media. Experimentally, we inject air into a thin bed of water-saturated glass beads and observe the invasion morphology. The control parameters are the injection rate, the bead size, and the confining stress. We identify three invasion regimes: capillary fingering, viscous fingering, and “capillary fracturing,” where capillary forces overcome frictional resistance and induce the opening of conduits. We derive two dimensionless numbers that govern the transition among the different regimes: a modified capillary number and a fracturing number. The experiments and analysis predict the emergence of fracturing in fine-grained media under low confining stress, a phenomenon that likely plays a fundamental role in many natural processes such as primary oil migration, methane venting from lake sediments, and the formation of desiccation cracks.
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/PhysRevLett.108.264504
