Heat and mass transfer in non-Newtonian fluids through porous materials have wide applications in nature and engineering. Compared to non-Newtonian fluid flow in porous materials, solute and heat transport in porous materials have been less investigated. Specially, effect of heterogeneity of porous structure on flow and transport and upscaling the bulk fluid properties to the porous media...
Flow and mixing at channel intersections are of broad interest because fluids with distinctive properties can efficiently mix and react at intersections, thereby controlling mixing and reaction processes in natural and engineered fractured and porous media. Recent studies showed that mixing and reaction hot spots are strongly linked with flow topological properties that form the backbone of...
Transport of dissolved substances through natural and engineered porous media is determined by the inherent complexity of the pore space, and diffusive mass transfer within and between pores. The interplay of pore-scale mixing and network-scale flow variability are key for the understanding of transport and contact processes in porous media with diverse applications ranging from groundwater...
Key words: porous media, haemodynamics, heterogeneity, modelling, microfluidics
Introduction
While extensive research has been devoted to fluid flows through porous media with comprehensive theories established ranging from pore-scale to field-scale (single-phase or multiphase, inertial or non-inertial, Newtonian or non-Newtonian, Darcy or non-Darcy), the underlying mechanisms for the...
A miscible horizontal interface separating two solutions of different solutes
can deform into convective finger-like structures due to buoyancy-driven
instabilities like the classical Rayleigh-Taylor instability or the
double-diffusive instabilities, triggered by differential diffusion of the
solutes in the solutions. We analyse numerically for porous media flows the
scaling of the...
Many important subsurface processes and applications, such as geologic carbon sequestration, enhanced geothermal system, and magma flow in dykes, involve flows of variable-density fluids in geologic fractures. Understanding the role of variable-density flow on transport, mixing, and geochemical reactions is essential for the prediction, design, and operation of the subsurface activities. In...
The flow of dilute polymer solution in model porous media consisting of an array of cylinder is considered. Numerical [1] and experimental [2] studies show that such flows are subject to the intensification of preferential flow paths. These pathways tend to favour shear stress and thus increase viscous dissipation and decrease permeability.
We seek to study the mechanisms of reinforcement of...
Many natural or industrial fluids exhibit non-Newtonian behavior. Non-Newtonian fluids can therefore be found in different applications related to porous or fractured media such as mud flows, oil recovery, hydraulic fracturing or foam injection clean-up.
Although there are many different non-Newtonian fluids, we focus in this work on fluids that exhibit a change in regime: for low shear-rate,...
An understanding of the interplay between non-linear effects in porous media flow and domain heterogeneity is of great importance in several engineering and geological applications.
For a one-dimensional, statistically heterogeneous medium, we investigate non-linear flow caused by a uniform external pressure gradient, and described at the local scale by the Forchheimer equation; in the...
The finger-like instabilities, referred to viscous fingering (VF), are commonly observed when a less viscous fluid displaces a more viscous fluid in a Hele-Shaw cell (two parallel plates with a small gap) and porous media. It is well recognized that the VF can reduce the sweep efficiency of displacement processes. But in the SWEPT area by injected fluids, the existing numerical modeling shows...
In recent years, the flow behaviors in low-permeability media have received much attention. Some experimental measurements indicate that single-phase flow in the low-permeability core seems to present the nonlinear behaviors rather than obeying the Darcy’s law. However, there are different opinions on the explanation of the experimental measurements. For two-phase flow, some scholars pointed...
Polymer solutions are often injected in porous media for applications such as oil recovery and groundwater remediation. In many cases, the macroscopic flow resistance abruptly increases above a threshold flow rate in a porous medium, but not in bulk solution. The reason why has been a puzzle for over half a century. Here, by directly visualizing the flow in a transparent 3D porous medium, we...
Population Balance Equation (PBE) successfully describes particle evolution in different flow conditions (Di Pasquale et al., 2012). However, despite predictive macroscopic models for polydisperse particulate flows are relevant for many Porous Media (PM) applications (Municchi and Icardi, 2020; Municchi et al., 2020) such as subsurface (water, oil) reservoirs and industrial...
Colloidal particles from industrial or natural sources propagate and may deposit and alter the environment they flow through. Predicting particle transport and deposition in these porous media is key to solve these problems. Deposition models generally propose empirical corrections of the common advection/diffusion system of equations to take into account the different types of interactions...
Predicting mutual fluid-solid interactions in subsurface reservoirs is essential to address critical geoscientific challenges related to geo-energy such as geothermal energy, hydrocarbon exploration, and underground storage sites. In this work, a mathematical setting is presented on the basis of the variational principle for the minimisation of fracturing system energy in the context of finite...
The direct numerical simulation of non-Newtonian fluids (modelled using shear stress-dependent Meter model) displacing oil in 3D Mt. Simon sandstone and 2D porous medium were conducted on heterogeneous media, and over a range of wettabilities (strong imbibition to strong drainage), capillary numbers and viscosity ratios. This study suggests that, compared to water flooding, viscous fingering...
