No Arabic abstract
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.
The impact of a liquid drop on a solid surface involves many intertwined physical effects, and is influenced by drop velocity, surface tension, ambient pressure and liquid viscosity, among others. Experiments by Kolinski et al. (2014b) show that the liquid-air interface begins to deviate away from the solid surface even before contact. They found that the lift-off of the interface starts at a critical time that scales with the square root of the kinematic viscosity of the liquid. To understand this, we study the approach of a liquid drop towards a solid surface in the presence of an intervening gas layer. We take a numerical approach to solve the Navier-Stokes equations for the liquid, coupled to the compressible lubrication equations for the gas, in two dimensions. With this approach, we recover the experimentally captured early time effect of liquid viscosity on the drop impact, but our results show that lift-off time and liquid kinematic viscosity have a more complex dependence than the square root scaling relationship. We also predict the effect of interfacial tension at the liquid-gas interface on the drop impact, showing that it mediates the lift-off behavior.
In this paper we study the influence of sample geometry on the measurement of pressure-saturation relationships, by analyzing the drainage of a two-phase flow from a quasi-2D random porous medium. The medium is transparent, which allows for the direct visualization of the invasion pattern during flow, and is initially saturated with a viscous liquid (a dyed glycerol-water mix). As the pressure in the liquid is gradually reduced, air penetrates from an open inlet, displacing the liquid which leaves the system from an outlet on the opposite side. Pressure measurements and images of the flow are recorded and the pressure-saturation relationship is computed. We show that this relationship depends on the system size and aspect ratio. The effects of the systems boundaries on this relationship are measured experimentally and compared with simulations produced using an invasion percolation algorithm. The pressure build up at the beginning and end of the invasion process are particularly affected by the boundaries of the system whereas at the central part of the model (when the air front progresses far from these boundaries), the invasion happens at a statistically constant capillary pressure. These observations have led us to propose a much simplified pressure-saturation relationship, valid for systems that are large enough such that the invasion is not influenced by boundary effects. The properties of this relationship depend on the capillary pressure thresholds distribution, sample dimensions and average pore connectivity and its applications may be of particular interest for simulations of two-phase flow in large porous media.
The influence of miscibility and liquid wettability during droplet impact onto thin wall films is investigated experimentally. Despite similar liquid properties and impact conditions, differences in the splashing limit, the crown extension and the duration of the ascending phase are observed. These differences are related to the interfacial tension of the droplet/wall-film liquid pairs, which is linked to their miscibility and wettability. More precisely, by calculating the crown surface energy, we show that the energy stored in the interface between droplet and wall-film (if any) is not negligible and leads to smaller crown extensions and the need of more kinetic energy to initiate splashing. Similarly, by calculating a modified capillary time taking into account all surface and interfacial tensions, we show that the interfacial tension acts as a non-negligible recoiling force, which reduces the duration of the ascending phase. The dynamics of this ascending phase is well captured for different wall-film thicknesses if accounting for the variations of the liquid masses in movement. Overall, droplet/wall-film interactions can be seen as inertio-capillary systems where the interfacial tension between droplet and wall film plays a significant role in the storage of energy and in the crown kinetics during the impact process. Besides, this analysis highlights that viscous losses have already a significant effect during the crown extension phase, by dissipating almost half of the initial energies for droplet impact onto thin wall films, and most likely by influencing the capillary time scale through damping.
Complex network theory provides an elegant and powerful framework to statistically investigate different types of systems such as society, brain or the structure of local and long-range dynamical interrelationships in the climate system. Network links in climate networks typically imply information, mass or energy exchange. However, the specific connection between oceanic or atmospheric flows and the climate networks structure is still unclear. We propose a theoretical approach for verifying relations between the correlation matrix and the climate network measures, generalizing previous studies and overcoming the restriction to stationary flows. Our methods are developed for correlations of a scalar quantity (temperature, for example) which satisfies an advection-diffusion dynamics in the presence of forcing and dissipation. Our approach reveals that correlation networks are not sensitive to steady sources and sinks and the profound impact of the signal decay rate on the network topology. We illustrate our results with calculations of degree and clustering for a meandering flow resembling a geophysical ocean jet.
We consider the collapse behavior of cavitation bubbles near walls under high ambient pressure conditions. Generic configurations with different stand-off distances are investigated by numerical simulation using a fully compressible two-phase flow solver including phase change. The results show that the stand-off distance has significant effects on collapse dynamics, micro-jet formation, rebound, and maximum wall pressure. A relation between cavitation induced material damage and corresponding collapse mechanisms is obtained from pressure-impact data at the wall. We analyze the resolution dependence of collapse and rebound and the observed maximum pressure distributions. The comparison of the results on six different grid resolutions shows that main collapse features are already captured on the coarsest resolution, while the peak pressures are strongly resolution dependent.