No Arabic abstract
The dynamics of individual liquid plugs pushed at constant pressure head inside prewetted cylindrical capillary tubes is investigated experimentally and theoretically. It is shown that, depending on the thickness of the prewetting film and the magnitude of the pressure head, the plugs can either experience a continuous acceleration leading to a dramatic decrease of their size and eventually their rupture or conversely, a progressive deceleration associated with their growth and an exacerbation of the airway obstruction. These behaviors are quantitatively reproduced with a simple nonlinear model [Baudoin et al., Proc. Nat. Ac. Sci. USA, 2013, 110, 859] adapted here for cylindrical channels. Furthermore, an analytical criterion for the transition between these two regimes is derived and successfully compared with extensive experimental data. The potential implications of this work for pulmonary obstructive diseases are discussed.
Liquid bridges are commonly encountered in nature and the liquid transfer induced by their rupture are widely used in various industrial applications. In this work, with the focus on the porous tip, we studied the impacts of capillary effects on the liquid transfer induced by the rupture through numerical simulations. To depict the capillary effects of a porous tip, a time scale ratio, R_T, is proposed to compare the competing mechanisms of spontaneous imbibitiona and external drag. In terms of R_T, we then develop a theoretical model for estimating the liquid retention ratio considering the geometry, porosity and wettability of tips. The mecahnism presented in this work provides a possible approach to control the liquid transfer with better accuracy in microfluidics or microfabrications.
The effect of bridge splitting is considered in the case of capillary adhesion: for a fixed total volume of liquid, does having more capillary bridges increase the total adhesion force? Previous studies have shown that the capillary-induced adhesion force between two planar surfaces is only substantially enhanced by bridge splitting in specific circumstances. Here this previous result is reconsidered, and it is shown that bridge splitting may significantly increase the adhesion forces when one of the surfaces is rough. The resistance to shear is also examined, and it is shown that bridge splitting on a rough surface can lead to a steady capillary-induced shear force that scales linearly with translation velocity, even in the absence of contact-line pinning.
Airflow through the nasal cavity exhibits a wide variety of fluid dynamicsbehaviour due to the intricacy of the nasal geometry. The flow is naturallyunsteady and perhaps turbulent, despite CFD in the literature that assumesa steady laminar flow. Time-dependent simulations can be used to generatedetailed data with the potential to uncover new flow behaviour, although theyare more computationally intensive compared with steady-state simulations. Furthermore, verification of CFD results has relied on reported pressure drop(e.g. nasal resistance) across the nasal airway although the geometries usedare different. This study investigated the unsteady nature of inhalation atflow rates of 10, 15, 20, and 30 L/min. A scale resolving CFD simulationusing a hybrid RANS-LES model was used and compared with experimentalmeasurements of the pressure distribution and the overall pressure drop in thenasal cavity. The experimental results indicated a large pressure drop acrossthe nasal valve, as well as across the nasopharynx with the latter attributedto a narrow cross-sectional area. At a flowrate of 30 L/min, the CFD simula-tions showed that the anterior half of the nasal cavity displayed dominantlylaminar but disturbed flow behaviour in the form of velocity fluctuations. Theposterior half of the nasal cavity displayed turbulent activity, characterised byerratic fluctuating velocities, which was enhanced by the wider cross-sectionalareas in the coronal plane. At 15L/min, the flow field was laminar dominantwith very little disturbance confirming a steady-state laminar flow assumptionis viable at this flow rate.
The aim of this study is to derive accurate models for quantities characterizing the dynamics of droplets of non-vanishing viscosity in capillaries. In particular, we propose models for the uniform-film thickness separating the droplet from the tube walls, for the droplet front and rear curvatures and pressure jumps, and for the droplet velocity in a range of capillary numbers, $Ca$, from $10^{-4}$ to $1$ and inner-to-outer viscosity ratios, $lambda$, from $0$, i.e. a bubble, to high viscosity droplets. Theoretical asymptotic results obtained in the limit of small capillary number are combined with accurate numerical simulations at larger $Ca$. With these models at hand, we can compute the pressure drop induced by the droplet. The film thickness at low capillary numbers ($Ca<10^{-3}$) agrees well with Brethertons scaling for bubbles as long as $lambda<1$. For larger viscosity ratios, the film thickness increases monotonically, before saturating for $lambda>10^3$ to a value $2^{2/3}$ times larger than the film thickness of a bubble. At larger capillary numbers, the film thickness follows the rational function proposed by Aussillous & Quere (2000) for bubbles, with a fitting coefficient which is viscosity-ratio dependent. This coefficient modifies the value to which the film thickness saturates at large capillary numbers. The velocity of the droplet is found to be strongly dependent on the capillary number and viscosity ratio. We also show that the normal viscous stresses at the front and rear caps of the droplets cannot be neglected when calculating the pressure drop for $Ca>10^{-3}$.
Wettability is a pore-scale property that has an important impact on capillarity, residual trapping, and hysteresis in porous media systems. In many applications, the wettability of the rock surface is assumed to be constant in time and uniform in space. However, many fluids are capable of altering the wettability of rock surfaces permanently and dynamically in time. Experiments have shown wettability alteration can significantly decrease capillarity in CO$_2$ storage applications. For these systems, the standard capillary-pressure model that assumes static wettability is insufficient to describe the physics. In this paper, we develop a new dynamic capillary-pressure model that takes into account changes in wettability at the pore-level by adding a dynamic term to the standard capillary pressure function. We simulate the dynamic system using a bundle-of-tubes (BoT) approach, where a mechanistic model for time-dependent contact angle change is introduced at the pore scale. The resulting capillary pressure curves are then used to quantify the dynamic component of the capillary pressure function. This study shows the importance of time-dependent wettability for determining capillary pressure over timescales of months to years. The impact of wettability has implications for experimental methodology as well as macroscale simulation of wettability-altering fluids.