Abstract
Fully understanding the mechanism of pore-scale immiscible displacement dominated by capillary forces, especially local instabilities and their influence on flow patterns, is essential for various industrial and environmental applications such as enhanced oil recovery, CO2 geo-sequestration and remediation of contaminated aquifers. It is well known that such immiscible displacement is extremely sensitive to the fluid properties and pore structure, especially the wetting properties of the porous medium which affect not only local interfacial instabilities at the micro-scale, but also displacement patterns at the macro-scale. In this review, local interfacial instabilities under three typical wetting conditions, namely Haines jump events during weakly-wetting drainage, snap-off events during strongly-wetting imbibition, and the co-existence of concave and convex interfaces under intermediate-wet condition, are reviewed to help understand the microscale physics and macroscopic consequences resulting in natural porous media.
RAS ID
45107
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
2019
Volume
2
Issue
1
Funding Information
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Darcy Center of Utrecht University
Eindhoven University of Technology
School
School of Engineering / Centre for Sustainable Energy and Resources
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Publisher
Yandy Scientific Press
Comments
Liu, Y., Iglauer, S., Cai, J., Amooie, M. A., & Qin, C. (2019). Local instabilities during capillary-dominated immiscible displacement in porous media. Capillarity, 2(1), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.26804/capi.2019.01.01