We propose an experimental setup based on diffusive wave spectroscopy for studying deformations of a solid material. The scattered waves are measured during the deformation of the solid material at different locations of its surface. The correlations of the scattered intensities are measured. The loss of correlation can be related to the invariants of the strain tensor of the solid, giving us a spatially resolved determination of the deformation near the surface. Experiments dealing with a point stress on plate for two kinds of elastic materials are presented and compared with the theoretical predictions.

It is well known that the transient behavior during drainage or imbibition in multiphase flow in porous media strongly depends on the history and initial condition of the system. However, when the steady-state regime is reached and both drainage and imbibition take place at the pore level, the influence of the evolution history and initial preparation is an open question. Here, we present an extensive experimental and numerical work investigating the history dependence of simultaneous steady-state two-phase flow through porous media. Our experimental system consists of a Hele-Shaw cell filled with glass beads which we model numerically by a network of disordered pores transporting two immiscible fluids. From measurements of global pressure evolution, histograms of saturation, and cluster-size distributions, we find that when both phases are flowing through the porous medium, the steady state does not depend on the initial preparation of the system or on the way it has been reached.

We present an experimental study of two-phase flow in a quasi-two-dimensional porous medium. The two phases, a water-glycerol solution and a commercial food grade rapeseed/canola oil, having an oil to water-glycerol viscosity ratio M = 1.3, are injected simultaneously into a Hele-Shaw cell with a mono-layer of randomly distributed glass beads. The two liquids are injected into the model from alternating point inlets. Initially, the porous model is filled with the water-glycerol solution. We observe that after an initial transient state, an overall static cluster configuration is obtained. While the oil is found to create a connected system spanning cluster, a large part of the water-glycerol clusters left behind the initial invasion front is observed to remain immobile throughout the rest of the experiment. This could suggest that the water-glycerol flow-dynamics is largely dominated by film flow. The flow pathways are thus given through the dynamics of the initial invasion. This behavior is quite different from that observed in systems with large viscosity differences between the two fluids, and where compressibility plays an important part of the process.