Partially miscible bubbles trapped within porous media occur in numerous applications, including geologic CO₂ sequestration, groundwater remediation, fuel cells, and most notably underground hydrogen storage (UHS). In UHS, hydrogen is cyclically injected and withdrawn – pre-charged by a cushion gas (e.g., CO₂) – generating trapped bubbles with distributions of sizes and compositions....
It is central to developing a statistical mechanics for immiscible two-phase flow in porous media to define a configurational entropy [1]. Imagine making a cut through a core sample orthogonally to the average flow direction. We may attach two pieces of information to each point in the cut: 1. is the point in the solid matrix, is it in the more wetting fluid or is it in the less wetting fluid?...
To face the climate change, underground reservoirs are promising candidates to sequester greenhouse gas such as CO2 or balance the intermittency of renewable energy sources by storing H2. The estimation of the hydraulic properties of the host rock appears as pivotal, to predict the migration of injected fluids and associated multiphysical solicitations at the reservoir scale. Thanks to the...
It is generally believed that whether a multicomponent system is miscible depends on the mixing energy. However, when droplets or bubbles are confined in nanoporous media with characteristic length scale R_0, its interfacial energy starts to reshape phase behavior because interfacial energy $(\propto R_0^2)$ may become comparable to or even dominant over mixing energy $(\propto R_0^3)$....
The novelty of this research lies in its original approach to controlling and suppressing viscous fingering in radial Hele–Shaw cells through time-dependent injection strategies tailored to the rheology of the fluid. Viscous fingering (also known as Saffman Taylor instability) is a hydrodynamic instability where a less viscous fluid displaces a more viscous one—leads to complex interfacial...
We present a way to design porous materials using pore-network modelling that predicts the effects of pore structure and wettability on coupled heat and mass transport with reaction. As an example we investigate the performance of electrochemical devices where the wettability of the porous electrodes governs the reaction rate and overall performance. We present a predictive pore-scale network...
Green hydrogen, produced through water electrolysis powered by renewable energy sources, has emerged as promising route for industrial decarbonization and energy storage. Electrolyzers are essential units for this process, as they split water into hydrogen and oxygen using clean electricity. Among different types of electrolysis technologies, Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) electrolyzers are...
Liquid foams are widely used in porous and granular media in applications such as enhanced oil recovery, soil remediation, and tunneling. In these contexts, foams are injected or generated within a solid matrix, where their structure and dynamics are strongly affected by confinement and by interactions with the grain surfaces.
In a series of recent works [1–4], we have investigated how the...
Anion exchange membrane water electrolysis is a promising technology for cost-effective green hydrogen production. However, its performance is strictly constrained by the coupled multiphase mass transport and reaction kinetics within the porous transport electrode. Specifically, the rapid accumulation of bubbles within the porous network often impedes electrolyte replenishment, leading to...
An “imperfect” Hele-Shaw cell (IHSC) with random variations of the aperture provides a useful analogue for a rough fracture. For flow of two immiscible fluids with a single interface between the phases in an IHSC tilted with respect to the horizontal plane, with pressure control at the inlet, there are, in general, multiple equilibrium interface profiles. This leads to hysteresis (history...
Liquid–gas dynamics within intricate pore networks serve as a typical example of a complex system. While the underlying physics at a local scale is well understood, the behavior of the system as a whole remains challenging to predict. This study seeks to uncover fundamental statistical relationships in porous media from the perspective of geometry and energy. To isolate the influence of pore...
For reservoir simulations which are essential to explore and optimize the feasibility for underground storage of hydrogen in saline aquifers, besides porosity and permeability also relative permeability is a required input parameter. Traditional methods to determine relative permeability suffer from various technical complications, safety risks in the laboratory, and most importantly a limited...
Two-phase flow in porous media governs the performance of subsurface energy and storage technologies, yet flow regimes beyond capillary-dominated Darcy behaviour remain insufficiently understood. In particular, intermittent flow arising under non-equilibrium injection conditions has been observed, but its development, stabilisation, and impact on injectivity are still poorly constrained. This...
In numerous industrial processes involving fluids, viscosity is a determinant factor for reaction rates, flows, drying, mixing, etc. Its importance is even more determinant for phenomena observed at the micro- and nanoscale such as in nanopores or in micro and nanochannels, for instance. [1] However, despite notable progress in the techniques used in microrheology in recent years, the...
Drying in porous media holds a great significance across a wide range of natural and engineering processes. Notable applications include food processing, pharmaceutical industries, porous building materials, soil and hydrology. For instance, during CO$_2$ injection, salt precipitation due to drying reduces permeability, posing a threat to sequestration by obstructing pores. In soil, drying and...
Deep saline aquifers are widely regarded as promising candidates for long-term CO2 sequestration, owing to their large storage capacity, favourable sealing conditions, and broad global distribution. Continuous CO2 injection is a prerequisite for the effective operation of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. However, the injection of dry CO2 can trigger evaporation of residual brine...
An acute understanding of multiphase flow in the subsurface and its interaction with different minerals is vital in solving challenging applications like CO2-sequestration, underground H2 storage, and enhanced oil recovery. Several dynamic pore-filling events occur at sub minute and sub second time resolution that fast dynamic scans of multiphase coreflooding experiments are required to study...
Subsurface reservoirs often exhibit complex wettability patterns, which significantly impact multiphase fluid flow and entrapment. Microfluidic systems have emerged as a key tool for studying pore-scale fluid dynamics; however, creating devices with controlled mixed wettability has been a challenge. This study presents a novel technique for fabricating micromodels with controlled mixed...
Polymer solutions are widely employed to regulate flow behavior in porous media and thereby enable fine control of multiphase displacement in systems such as energy production, materials shaping and chemical processing. However, continuous polymer injection often suffers from high injection pressure, large chemical consumption and strong adsorption, which has motivated the development of...
The immiscible displacement of a wetting fluid by a non-wetting fluid in rough fractures is essential for optimizing subsurface operations such as enhanced oil recovery and geological carbon sequestration (GCS). Despite its importance, a comprehensive understanding of drainage flows in fractures, considering factors such as fracture geometry, fluid properties, and flow regimes, remains...
Liquid-vapor multiphase flow and its phase change in porous media are widely applied in engineering fields, such as transpiration cooling of high-speed aircraft, heat removal of chip stacks, proton exchange membrane fuel cells, etc. In this presentation, by utilizing the hybrid lattice Boltzmann method, the mechanisms of coupled liquid-vapor two-phase flows, phase change and heat/mass transfer...
The polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell~(PEMFC) is a potential alternative in the backdrop of
an evolving energy landscape i.e. emission norms, electrification and sustainability.
The commercialization of PEMFC has been a challenging process inspite of advantages like zero emissions, high efficiency
and power density. The hurdles on the other hand include the cost of the catalyst, the...
Depressurization in hydrocarbon reservoirs can mobilize trapped gas in the presence of residual oil and water and lead to improved recovery. The effects of reservoir pressure cycling are also important for storage applications in depleted reservoirs, like temporary storage of natural gas and hydrogen, and in permanent CO2 storage, where reservoir pressure may drop temporarily due to fault...
Tight sandstone gas reservoir is the most abundant resource among unconventional gas energy. A comprehensive investigation of the displacement patterns for the gas-displacing water process in the tight sandstone is crucial for understanding the formation mechanisms of tight sandstone gas reservoirs, predicting gas-water distribution, and adopting appropriate development strategies. In this...
Drying of porous media plays a central role in both natural engineering processes, particularly in evaporative cooling applications. Predicting non-isothermal drying rates remains challenging due to the strong coupling among multiphase flow, multicomponent transport, conjugate heat transfer, and phase change. This study applies a hybrid lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) that couples a multiphase...
Composite materials used in aerospace applications are made of carbon fibre reinforcements impregnated with polymeric resin. These materials can be manufactured by Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) in which resin is injected and flows into a fibrous preform.
Composite materials reinforced with 3D fibrous architectures are often well-suited for applications involving severe thermo-mechanical...
Two-phase displacement in porous media is a fundamental process in natural and industrial systems (e.g., geological carbon storage, enhanced oil recovery) and has been extensively studied. Under the low-Reynolds number (low-Re) assumption—justified by the typically small apparent flow velocities in porous media—the inertial effect is generally neglected. However, in scenarios such as...
Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) particles present high porosity, between 40 and 70% with a bi-modal pore size distribution around 1 and 7 µm, as seen in Figure 1. Their melting in an Electric Smelting Furnace (ESF) slag displays complex behaviour involving chemical reactions, heat transfer, and fluid-solid flows, resulting in rheological changes in the porous DRI matrix such as a reduction in...
Water infiltration in the vadose zone is a transient and unstable process influenced by several factors, including the non-linearity of soil hydraulic properties, rapidly changing boundary conditions, root growth, hysteresis, and soil heterogeneity. As a result, infiltration is often non-uniform and develops into preferential flow. This complex phenomenon, commonly manifested as gravity...
Conventional primary and secondary recovery methods typically extract only 30–50% of the original oil in place, leaving substantial volumes trapped due to capillary forces at the pore scale and poor sweep efficiency at the reservoir scale. To mitigate these limitations, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) strategies based on emulsion flooding have been investigated, as they offer the potential to...
We conducted steady-state CO2 – brine relative permeability experiments on a reservoir carbonate sample, integrated with in-situ X-ray microtomography imaging under capillary-dominated conditions. We observed low CO2 relative permeability with a maximum value of 0.3 and significant hysteresis between drainage and imbibition, accompanied by a high residual CO2 saturation of 0.27 from a maximum...
Shale serves as a crucial subsurface reservoir for energy-related processes, including shale gas production, geological carbon storage (CCUS) (Ma et al.,2021), and underground hydrogen storage (Wang et al., 2024). However, the extreme heterogeneity of shale pore structures poses a fundamental challenge for permeability characterization, as existing imaging techniques suffer from an inherent...
During waterflooding in reservoirs, complex pore structures and heterogeneous pore-throat distributions lead to the formation of substantial amounts of residual oil at the microscopic scale. Accurately predicting its spatial distribution remains a critical challenge for understanding pore-scale displacement mechanisms and improving oil recovery. Although conventional physical experiments and...
Carbon mineralization is considered the most stable method for long-term carbon storage. Carbon mineralization is favored in mafic/ultramafic rocks due to their high content of reactive minerals which efficiently react with CO2 to form solid carbonates. We have spent the past few years exploring how NMR can be used to quantify changes in pore size distributions and pore surface relaxivity as a...
Evaporation-driven drying of earthen construction materials is a two-phase (air–water) displacement problem in a heterogeneous porous medium, where capillary forces, evolving connectivity, and (for swelling clays) matrix deformation jointly control the Darcy-scale effective properties. A central missing input for predictive multiphase models is the **relative permeability function...
For years, our group has been developing innovative experimental methodologies [1] to monitor liquid transfer in porous media and complex fluids using dynamic NMR relaxometry. Combined with MRI, this non-invasive, multiscale, and time-resolved approach enables the individual tracking of all out-of-equilibrium protonic liquid phases during processes such as drying, imbibition, or internal water...
Wettability is a primary factor controlling how fluids flow in porous media during multiphase flow and yet we still know relatively little about how wettability affects the two-phase relative permeability (kr) of both the wetting and nonwetting phases. An integrated experimental methodology was used to measure how wettability (ranging from hydrophilic to hydrophobic behavior of the porous...
