Optical measurement of pore scale velocity field inside microporous media

Abstract

An experimental technique to quantify velocity field at pore scale with in microporous media, formed by packing of microglass spheres of size 200 lm inside a glass micro-model, is presented. A microparticle image velocimetry (l-PIV) system is used to study velocity fields at four different spatial regions in the microporous medium. A combined particle image velocimetry (PIV) and particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) scheme is used to quantify velocity within a typical pore size of 10-50 lm. The experiments are conducted at four different flow rates. Two different measurement planes are selected for obtaining the detailed pore scale velocity field-one close to the glass wall and the other inside the porous medium at a distance 100 lm below the glass wall. The image processing technique for dealing with noisy data and sparse vector field has been discussed in detail. Probability density functions of transverse and axial velocity components are compared with available results in literature. The pore scale velocity field obtained can provide insight to flow properties in microporous media and can be a powerful tool to validate existing numerical results for flow through porous media.

Pore-scale interfacial dynamics and oil–water relative permeabilities of capillary driven counter-current flow in fractured porous media

“…With the advances in experimental techniques, such pore-scale velocity simulations can be compared with the porescale experimental data (Sen et al, 2011).…”

Transitional and Turbulent Flow in a Bed of Spheres as Measured with Stereoscopic Particle Image Velocimetry

“…With this technique, 2D fluid velocities have been derived for low Re flow through a porous medium of a sintered disordered packing of hydrophilic glass beads (Datta et al 2013). A similar porous media model was studied in Sen et al (2012) with µPIV yielding 2D low Re velocity fields.…”

Pore-scale dispersion: Bridging the gap between microscopic pore structure and the emerging macroscopic transport behavior

“…More detailed experimental investigations focusing on resolved flow fields in upscaled media, e.g., bead packs, were conducted by Moroni and Cushman [6] and Moroni et al [7] at the beginning of this century. Only quite recently, corresponding micro-scale experiments were documented [8,9]. The more recent studies [6][7][8][9] focus on three-dimensional configurations to inspect transport or dispersion in both mean-flow parallel, i.e., longitudinal, and transverse directions.…”

“…Only quite recently, corresponding micro-scale experiments were documented [8,9]. The more recent studies [6][7][8][9] focus on three-dimensional configurations to inspect transport or dispersion in both mean-flow parallel, i.e., longitudinal, and transverse directions. Moreover, they point out the need for devising an efficient macroscopic representation of the microscopic pore-scale dynamics, which is the main goal of our work.…”