Stabilizing Fluid-Fluid Displacements in Porous Media Through Wettability Alteration

Trojer, Mathias; Szulczewski, M.; Juanes, Rubén

doi:10.1103/physrevapplied.3.054008

Cited by 155 publications

(188 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…Specifically, the morphology of the displacement pattern broadens as the invading fluid becomes more wetting to the medium. This observation was confirmed by recent experiments (20) and pore-scale simulations (21), which found that increasing the medium's affinity to the invading fluid makes the invasion pattern more compact at all Ca. However, the complete range of wetting conditions in imbibition is yet to be fully explored, especially in the regime where the invading fluid is strongly wetting to the porous medium.…”

supporting

confidence: 76%

Wettability control on multiphase flow in patterned microfluidics

Zhao

MacMinn

Juanes

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Multiphase flow in porous media is important in many natural and industrial processes, including geologic CO 2 sequestration, enhanced oil recovery, and water infiltration into soil. Although it is well known that the wetting properties of porous media can vary drastically depending on the type of media and pore fluids, the effect of wettability on multiphase flow continues to challenge our microscopic and macroscopic descriptions. Here, we study the impact of wettability on viscously unfavorable fluid-fluid displacement in disordered media by means of high-resolution imaging in microfluidic flow cells patterned with vertical posts. By systematically varying the wettability of the flow cell over a wide range of contact angles, we find that increasing the substrate's affinity to the invading fluid results in more efficient displacement of the defending fluid up to a critical wetting transition, beyond which the trend is reversed. We identify the pore-scale mechanisms-cooperative pore filling (increasing displacement efficiency) and corner flow (decreasing displacement efficiency)-responsible for this macroscale behavior, and show that they rely on the inherent 3D nature of interfacial flows, even in quasi-2D media. Our results demonstrate the powerful control of wettability on multiphase flow in porous media, and show that the markedly different invasion protocols that emerge-from pore filling to postbridging-are determined by physical mechanisms that are missing from current pore-scale and continuum-scale descriptions.porous media | capillarity | wettability | microfluidics | pattern formation M ultiphase flow in porous media is important in many natural and industrial processes, including geologic CO 2 sequestration (1), enhanced oil recovery (2), water infiltration into soil (3), and transport in polymer electrolyte fuel cells (4). Much of the research on multiphase flow in porous media has focused on the effect of fluid properties and flow conditions. Much less emphasis has been given to the fluids' affinity to the porous media (i.e., wettability), even though wettability has a profound influence on fluid-fluid interactions in the presence of a solid surface (5-7). Despite recent advances in our ability to accurately measure wettability under reservoir conditions (8, 9), and to engineer wettability in the subsurface (10-13), the complex physics of wetting continues to challenge our microscopic and macroscopic descriptions (14).Fluid-fluid displacement in the presence of a solid surface can be characterized as either drainage or imbibition, depending on the system's wettability. Drainage refers to the regime where the invading fluid is less wetting to the solid surface than the defending fluid. Imbibition refers to the opposite case, where the invading fluid is more wetting to the solid surface than the defending fluid. Drainage in porous media has been studied extensively through laboratory experiments and computer simulations (15-18), and we now have a fairly good understanding of the different displacement ...

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supporting

confidence: 76%

Wettability control on multiphase flow in patterned microfluidics

Zhao

MacMinn

Juanes

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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450

480

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“…For high disorder ( λ = 0.82), we reproduce the transition from CF to VF as the rate increases in drainage8 (wetting angle θ < 90°, θ measured through the defending fluid, see Fig. 1c), and the smoothing (“stabilizing”) effect of increasing θ towards imbibition ( θ > 90°), reducing trapping1112 (Fig. 2).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Increasing affinity of the invading fluid (from drainage to imbibition, when the invading fluid is more wetting) smoothes the invasion front, even at high, unfavorable M 10. At low rates, increasing wettability leads to a transition between CF and CO, whereas increasing Ca enhances viscous instabilities promoting VF, regardless of wettability1112. We note that the frequent use of the term “(in)stability” to describe the pattern, and the interchange of “stability” with “efficiency” or “compactness”.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Pore-Scale Disorder on Fluid Displacement in Partially-Wettable Porous Media

Holtzman

2016

Sci Rep

110

125

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We present a systematic, quantitative assessment of the impact of pore size disorder and its interplay with flow rates and wettability on immiscible displacement of a viscous fluid. Pore-scale simulations and micromodel experiments show that reducing disorder increases the displacement efficiency and compactness, minimizing the fluid-fluid interfacial area, through (i) trapping at low rates and (ii) viscous fingering at high rates. Increasing the wetting angle suppresses both trapping and fingering, hence reducing the sensitivity of the displacement to the underlying disorder. A modified capillary number Ca* that includes the impact of disorder λ on viscous forces (through pore connectivity) is direct related to λ, in par with previous works. Our findings bear important consequences on sweep efficiency and fluid mixing and reactions, which are key in applications such as microfluidics to carbon geosequestration, energy recovery, and soil aeration and remediation.

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“…This is an expected result; indeed in imbibition the invading fingers are expected to be broader [96][97][98], since they have the tendency to wet the pores and thus explore more easily neighboring pores. Figure 17 shows depth saturation profiles for both imbibition and drainage experiments in the viscous fingering regime.…”

Section: Imbibition and Drainage With Imposed Flux (Velocity-inlet Anmentioning

confidence: 91%

Generalized three-dimensional lattice Boltzmann color-gradient method for immiscible two-phase pore-scale imbibition and drainage in porous media

et al. 2017

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This article presents a three-dimensional numerical framework for the simulation of fluid-fluid immiscible compounds in complex geometries, based on the multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann method to model the fluid dynamics and the color-gradient approach to model multicomponent flow interaction. New lattice weights for the lattices D3Q15, D3Q19, and D3Q27 that improve the Galilean invariance of the color-gradient model as well as for modeling the interfacial tension are derived and provided in the Appendix. The presented method proposes in particular an approach to model the interaction between the fluid compound and the solid, and to maintain a precise contact angle between the two-component interface and the wall. Contrarily to previous approaches proposed in the literature, this method yields accurate solutions even in complex geometries and does not suffer from numerical artifacts like nonphysical mass transfer along the solid wall, which is crucial for modeling imbibition-type problems. The article also proposes an approach to model inflow and outflow boundaries with the color-gradient method by generalizing the regularized boundary conditions. The numerical framework is first validated for three-dimensional (3D) stationary state (Jurin's law) and time-dependent (Washburn's law and capillary waves) problems. Then, the usefulness of the method for practical problems of pore-scale flow imbibition and drainage in porous media is demonstrated. Through the simulation of nonwetting displacement in two-dimensional random porous media networks, we show that the model properly reproduces three main invasion regimes (stable displacement, capillary fingering, and viscous fingering) as well as the saturating zone transition between these regimes. Finally, the ability to simulate immiscible two-component flow imbibition and drainage is validated, with excellent results, by numerical simulations in a Berea sandstone, a frequently used benchmark case used in this field, using a complex geometry that originates from a 3D scan of a porous sandstone. The methods presented in this article were implemented in the open-source PALABOS library, a general C++ matrix-based library well adapted for massive fluid flow parallel computation.

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Stabilizing Fluid-Fluid Displacements in Porous Media Through Wettability Alteration

Cited by 155 publications

References 75 publications

Wettability control on multiphase flow in patterned microfluidics

Wettability control on multiphase flow in patterned microfluidics

Effects of Pore-Scale Disorder on Fluid Displacement in Partially-Wettable Porous Media

Generalized three-dimensional lattice Boltzmann color-gradient method for immiscible two-phase pore-scale imbibition and drainage in porous media

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