Bulletin of the American Physical Society
77th Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics
Sunday–Tuesday, November 24–26, 2024; Salt Lake City, Utah
Session C08: Interact: Innovations in Flows in Porous Media |
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Chair: Howard Stone, Princeton University Room: Ballroom H |
Sunday, November 24, 2024 10:50AM - 11:20AM |
C08.00001: INTERACT FLASH TALKS: Innovations in Flows in Porous Media Each Interact Flash Talk will last around 1 minute, followed by around 30 seconds of transition time. |
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C08.00002: Joule-Thomson cooling during CO2 injection in depleted reservoirs Jerome A. Neufeld, Lucy Tweed Geological CO2 storage in reservoirs where the ambient pressure is low poses significant challenges due to the decompression and concomitant Joule-Thomson cooling on injection of high-pressure, dense CO2. The resulting low temperatures around the wellbore risk phase change, thermal fracturing and/or freezing of pore waters or precipitation of gas hydrates which would reduce injectivity and jeopardise near-well stability. |
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C08.00003: Convection in porous media with dispersion: experiments, pore-scale and Darcy simulations Marco DePaoli, Christopher J Howland, Roberto Verzicco, Detlef Lohse Convection in porous media is ubiquitous in natural and industrial processes. For mass transport in geophysical systems, solute dispersion is an important effect to be understood, and this dispersion cannot be described by molecular diffusion alone. The presence of solid obstacles in the porous matrix induces an additional solute spreading, due to the convoluted fluid movements through the medium. Modelling the dispersion effect remains a challenging task due to the vast parameter space encompassing medium properties such as porosity and permeability, fluid characteristics including buoyancy forces and diffusivity, and domain attributes like the height of the medium. As a result, multiple methods are required to understand the flow dynamics at the different scales involved, ranging from the level of the pores, with a sub-millimetre characteristic length, to the Darcy scale, involving hundreds of pores and relevant to practical applications. In this work, we investigate convection in porous media with dispersion using a combination of Hele-Shaw-like experiments in bead packs, pore-scale simulations and Darcy simulations. Building upon our previous work (De Paoli et al., J. Fluid Mech., 987, A1, 2024), we present additional experimental results along with three-dimensional pore-scale simulations and Darcy simulations incorporating dispersion effects. The mechanism of dispersion is accounted for by employing a Fickian anisotropic dispersion model (Wen et al., Phys. Rev. Fluids, 3, 12, 2018). The system considered is the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, consisting of two miscible fluids of different density in an unstable configuration, filling a saturated, homogeneous and isotropic porous medium. Results are compared in terms of global response parameters associated with the flow structure and mixing state of the system (namely, wavenumber, mixing length and mean scalar dissipation). In this idealised configuration, which is well-defined and controllable, we compare our findings to derive simple physical models and to identify suitable parameters to model the effect of dispersion at the Darcy scale. |
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C08.00004: Characterizing Static and Dynamic Capillary Pressure in Porous Media Using a Novel Microfluidic Pressure Sensor Nishagar Raventhiran, Erick Johnson, Yaofa Li Capillary pressure is a critical parameter in multiphase flows in porous media. Traditional models often describe these flows based on empirical constitutive relations of capillary pressure which however exhibit strong hysteresis. It has been the goal for many recent studies to develop a nonhysteretic relation of capillary pressure to link the pore scale processes with the macro-scale observations. However, direct measurement at the pore level is hindered by the small scale and the stringent requirements for spatial and temporal resolutions. To that end, we developed an on-chip pressure sensor using soft lithography with a thin polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) membrane. This membrane deflects in response to pressure changes, which are quantified optically using astigmatic particle tracking. Integrated with a high-speed camera and microscope, our setup enables real-time, in-situ measurement of capillary pressure within individual pore spaces, offering unprecedented insights into pore-scale mechanisms. Furthermore, we optimized the response time of the sensor to enable instantaneous measurement of dynamic pressure at the pore level. These quantification will be compared with conventional measurement such as bulk flow pressure transducers and image-based calculations, providing new insight into the hysteretic behavior of capillary pressure as well as validations of new functional forms. |
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C08.00005: Estimating the interfacial permeability for flow into a poroelastic medium Zelai Xu, Pengtao Yue, James J Feng Boundary conditions between a porous solid and a fluid have been a long-standing problem in modeling porous media. For deformable poroelastic materials such as hydrogels, the question is further complicated by the elastic stress from the solid network. Recently, an interfacial permeability condition has been developed from the principle of positive energy dissipation on the hydrogel–fluid interface. Although this boundary condition has been used in flow computations and yielded reasonable predictions, it contains an interfacial permeability η as a phenomenological parameter. In this work, we use pore-scale models of flow into a periodic array of solid cylinders or parallel holes to determine η as a function of the pore size and porosity. This provides a means to evaluate the interfacial permeability for a wide range of poroelastic materials, including hydrogels, foams, and biological tissues, to enable realistic flow simulations. |
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C08.00006: Two phase outflow from fibrous porous media: experiments and modeling Zak Kujala, Christopher W. MacMinn, Sungyon Lee Two phase flow in porous media has been studied for its applications in oil recovery, CO2 storage, and other industrial processes. Much of the existing work focuses on what happens within the porous media, but two phase outflow form a porous media is relatively unexplored. In this work, we study coalescence filtration as an example of this type of flow. In coalescence filtration, the goal is to coalesce small droplets that are difficult to remove into larger ones that are easier to remove. Using a microfluidic setup, we investigate how the water (dispersed phase) and oil (continuous phase) flow rates through the filter media affect the produced droplet sizes. Our experiments show that the droplet size increases with the fractional water flow rate, and only weakly depends on the total flow rate through the filter media. We use mathematical modeling and scaling to explain these trends. |
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C08.00007: Permeation of high concentration polymer fluids in porous micromodels Callum Cuttle, Christopher W. MacMinn We present an experimental model of the flow of high molecular weight polymer fluids from an open cavity into a porous medium. Our micromodels consist of microfluidic devices that recapitulate porous geometries and interfaces at a range of scales. As a model fluid, we study partially hydrolyzed polyacrylamide (HPAM) solutions. Using a custom microscopy setup and a variety of imaging methods, including machine learning-assisted particle tracking velocimetry, we explore both three-dimensional pore-scale flow and two-dimensional network-scale flow. In previous work, HPAM solutions have been widely employed in porous micromodels due to their well characterized shear thinning rheology, which holds relevance to many practical applications. Motivated by the specific role of these solutions as support fluids in civil engineering projects, we investigate higher concentrations than have typically been explored (beyond the critical overlap concentration) and the influence of solid colloidal contaminants, which capture typical site conditions that have previously been overlooked in laboratory experiments. |
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C08.00008: Diffusiophoretic dispersion of a colloidal blob in 2D porous media Aditya Pujari, Amir A Pahlavan The transport of solute and colloid mixtures through porous media are fundamental processes in both natural and engineered environments. In such systems, the existence of solute gradients induces a drift in the colloids either up (salt-attracting) or down the gradient (salt-repelling)--a phenomenon known as diffusiophoresis. In this work, we study the dispersion of a mixed blob of colloids and salt released in a 2D porous medium using numerical simulations and experiments. We observe that solute gradients modify the early-time dispersion of the colloidal blob, leading to reduced dispersion in the salt-repelling case and enhanced dispersion in the salt-attracting case. We further study the role of flow velocity distribution and Peclet number (Pe) by controlling the flow rate and introducing disorder into the lattice. |
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C08.00009: Testing applicability of homogenization techniques for understanding macroscopic subglacial soil properties from microscale porewater-sediment interactions Ian Madden, Dougal D Hansen, Lucas Zoet, Jenny Suckale Permeability is a crucial macroscopic quantity to describe porous flows, but can be difficult to estimate through first principles, especially for geophysical granular media due to its high spatiotemporal variability at many scales. Upscaling techniques can offer a generalizable framework of interpretable models that connect flow laws; for example, homogenization of Stokes flow through grains leads to Darcian flow. However, these techniques are often overlooked in geophysics in favor of laboratory measurements on samples or empirical parametrizations. Empirical techniques have limited interpretability, meaning that they leave uncertainty in their generalizability both spatially and temporally. |
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C08.00010: Influence of flow regimes on particle capture by hair-covered surfaces Emilie Dressaire, Sean Bohling, Jiayang Huang Aquatic organisms rely on hair-covered surfaces to capture molecules and particles of interest. The flow through model hair-covered surfaces has traditionally been studied in a flow channel and three regimes have been reported, with increasing fluid transport through the array: rake, deflection, and sieve. The flow regime depends on the Reynolds number of the flow, and the porosity of the array. To study particle capture, we develop an experimental set up in which the hair-covered array moves along a circular trajectory. Through a combination of experiments and numerical simulations, we characterize the influence of the flow regime on particle capture. Our results show that the capture efficiency is a function of the volume filtered and the mode of capture. |
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C08.00011: Mathematical Modeling of Adsorption and Sieving in Membrane Pore Networks Binan Gu, Pejman Sanaei, Lou Kondic, Linda J Cummings In this work, we model membrane filtration in a network of pores with simultaneous adsorption and sieving, the two fouling mechanisms typically observed during the early stages of commercial filtration applications. In our model, first-principle partial differential equations model adsorptive fouling and species transport in the continuum in each pore, whereas sieving particles are assumed to follow a discrete Poisson arrival process. Our goal is to not only understand the individual influence of each fouling mode but also highlight the effect of their coupling on the performance of pore-radius graded banded filters. Our results suggest that, due to the discrete nature of pore blockage, sieving alters the convexity of the flux decline. Moreover, the difference between sieving particle sizes and the initial pore radius in each band plays a crucial role in indicating the onset and disappearance of sieving-adsorption competition. Lastly, we demonstrate a phase transition in filter lifetime as a function of the arrival frequency of sieving particles. |
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C08.00012: Determining the porous medium parameters of a hollow fiber hemodialyzer using computational methods alone. Ruhit Sinha, Anne E Staples Hollow fiber hemodialyzers are cylindrical units that contain thousands of hollow fibers. The dialyzer fluid (dialysate) enters perpendicularly through the inlet dialysate port, gets distributed circumferentially and passes axially outside the hollow fibers in the shell region of the dialzyer. The dialysate exits the dialyzer through outlet port in the similar fashion as it entered. Due to its complex geometry, studies have treated the dialysate flow domain as a porous medium. However, these studies have had to rely on experiments to find the porous medium characteristics such as the permeability. For the first time, by performing 3D Navier-Stokes simulations of the dialysate flow, in conjunction with parametric 2D axisymmetric porous media simulations of flow through the same domain, we have developed a method for finding porous medium parameters such as the axial and radial Darcy’s permeability parameters for a given dialyzer, solely using computational methods. |
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C08.00013: A mathematical model for flow, fouling and optimization of pleated filters Pejman Sanaei, Daniel Fong Pleated membrane filters are ubiquitous in many industrial filtration systems due to their high surface area to volume ratio. However, their performance often falls short compared to flat non-pleated membrane filters of the same membrane surface area. This raises the question: What is the optimal initial internal pore structure of the membrane to achieve the most efficient filtration? To address this question, we first present a mathematical model describing the feed flow and particle transport within the complex geometry of a pleated filter. We then analyze the governing equations using asymptotic analysis by exploiting the small aspect ratios of the pleated membrane and filter cartridge. In the second part of the paper, we formulate a computationally efficient optimization problem aimed at determining the optimal initial pore shape to improve filtration performance. Depending on the initial average porosity, substantial differences in the computed optimal pore profile is observed. Furthermore, by varying a geometric parameter in our model, we investigate the influence of the pleat packing density on the optimal initial pore shape. |
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C08.00014: Mixing in compact porous reactors Dario Maggiolo Porous reactors, such as fixed-beds, are often used to geometrically support a large reactive interface for the conversion of molecules continuously injected in a spatially compact device, where the ratio between transverse and longitudinal system sizes is minimized. We show, via pore-scale numerical simulations, that, in such compact systems, solute mixing is dominated by stretching-mediated random overlapping of concentration elements, occurring transversally to the direction of the main flow velocity U. Compared to a full three-dimensional random overlapping scenario, mixing dynamics is slower, characterized by a temporal decay of concentration variance σ2 ∼ (U/d t)-1/2, with d the catalyst particle size. Our analysis indicates that such a mixing mechanism regulates the homogenization of reaction at the reactive fluid-solid interface. We discuss the implications for packed bed column experiments and heat releaser devices. |
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C08.00015: A unified flow-material approach to study the oxidation of carbon-based porous materials. Bruno Dias, Jeremie Meurisse, Francesco Panerai, Nagi N Mansour In recent decades, space exploration has aimed to visit other planets and sample cosmic bodies within our solar system. As these ambitions increase, new technologies and the development of lightweight materials are needed to design spacecraft Thermal Protection Systems (TPS) that endure the harsh environment of hypersonic atmospheric entry and ensure the safety of the payload. Current methods used to design the TPS decouple the flow phase from the material phase, hindering the physics at the interface and, therefore, not fully capturing the coupling effects between each phase. In this presentation, we present the development of a unified macroscale formulation for the conservation of mass, momentum, and energy for both fluid and material phases, allowing an intrinsic coupling between them. We validate the unified approach against FiberForm flow-tube experiments under an oxidizing environment. The experiment concerns a molecular oxygen flow where carbon oxidation is active, and we compare the numerical material recession with the measured one. The finding of the presentation shows the importance of modeling the flow and material in a unified manner and reveals essential aspects that previous coupling approaches cannot. |
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C08.00016: Leaving a Mark: How Droplets Spread, Stain, and Fade away Garam Lee, Samira Shiri, James C Bird When a drop contacts and absorbs in a thin porous surface, it can wick outward, leading to a stain whose size depends on how far the drop spreads. A non-volatile drop is predicted to wick indefinitely; however, if the drop is volatile, the effect of evaporation on the extent of spreading is not well understood. Here we measure and model how evaporation can reverse the direction of the liquid front so that the wetted patch shrinks after reaching a maximum diameter. We demonstrate that the dynamics collapse to a universal curve independent of the substrate and drying time, and we discuss how this property, along with related scalings, can be exploited in a variety of applications ranging from forensics to firefighting. |
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C08.00017: Modelling evaporation-driven flows in capillary porous media Ellen K Luckins The evaporation of a liquid from within a capillary porous material (one in which capillary forces play a dominant role) is a complicated process involving coupled capillary flow, vapour diffusion, and phase-change. Different drying behaviours are observed at different stages during the process. Initially, liquid is drawn to the surface by capillary forces, where it evaporates at a near constant rate; thereafter a drying front recedes into the material, with a slower net evaporation rate. In this talk we derive mathematical models for this drying process by making systematically reducing an averaged continuum fluid-flow model, using the method of matched asymptotic expansions. Our analysis gives insight into the mechanisms that determine the overall drying timescale and the time of the transition from the constant-evaporation-rate period to the receding-front period of the drying process. |
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C08.00018: How dissolved minerals affect the transport and retention of microplastics in unsaturated porous media Dang Quoc Duong, David Salac, Sangwoo Shin Microplastics, which are ubiquitous and acknowledged as one of the major pollutants in the subsurface environment, commonly enter unsaturated soil through intermittent saturation events, such as rain or discharge. This process is relatively less understood due to the inherent limitation of the characterization of the transport processes in the soil. By utilizing a soil-mimicking microfluidic porous media, we investigate the impact of dissolved mineral species on the transport and deposition of microplastics in unsaturated porous media. While the transport of microplastics in saturated porous media is governed primarily by pore flow, the sudden, periodic introduction of mineral-rich immobile water pockets in unsaturated porous media alters the microplastic transport at the pore scale, leading to increased retention of the microplastics in impermeable pore space that is dependent on the mineral type and concentration. Our study offers insights into the overlooked impact of dissolved minerals within unsaturated pore spaces on the fate and transport of microplastics in soil. |
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C08.00019: The fluid mechanics of mineral extraction Fernando Temprano-Coleto, Meiqi Yang, Kelvin A Green, Minh Tanh Nguyen, Xi Chen, Sunxiang Zheng, Z. Jason Ren, Howard A Stone The ongoing energy transition revolves around the utilization of strategic minerals at unprecedented scales. Elements like lithium, predominantly extracted from natural brines, are increasingly demanded for the electrification of the economy. Current production methods require the pre-concentration of the mineral, which is achieved in multi-stage ponds where ambient evaporation extracts water from the brine, precipitating the most abundant salts (e.g. sodium chloride) while the target species (lithium) gets concentrated. However, this process has long operating times, requires extensive land use, and depletes surrounding aquifers due to uncontrolled evaporation. Here, we demonstrate how porous cellulose crystallizers can, through evaporation-driven capillary flow, increase the rate of lithium extraction per unit of surface area by an order of magnitude, thereby reducing land use and operation times by over 90% [Chen et al., Nature Water (2023)]. A simple transport model recapitulates the observed high lithium selectivity, which stems from the sharp salt gradients at the top of the evaporator that result from the interplay between advection and diffusion. Motivated by the strong influence of fluid flow in this industrially critical process, we also explore the wide range of underlying transport processes that are present in realistic scenarios. Through mathematical modeling and microfluidic experiments, we illustrate how physicochemical factors like the variable activity and viscosity of the brine solution, which change noticeably near saturation, are key to understand and quantify in order to advance the next generation of mineral extraction technology. |
Sunday, November 24, 2024 11:20AM - 12:50PM |
C08.00020: INTERACT DISCUSSION SESSION WITH POSTERS: Innovations in Flows in Porous Media After each Flash Talk has concluded, the Interact session will be followed by interactive poster or e-poster presentations, with plenty of time for one-on-one and small group discussions. |
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C08.00021: Convection in the active layer speeds up permafrost thaw Guido Boffetta, Marta Magnani, Antonello Provenzale, Stefano Musacchio Permafrost thaw is a major concern raised by the ongoing climate change. An understudied phenomenon possibly affecting the pace of permafrost thaw is the onset of convective motions within the active layer caused by the density anomaly of water. Here, we explore the effects of groundwater convection on permafrost thawing using a model that accounts for ice - water phase transitions, coupled with the dynamics of the temperature field transported by the Darcy's flow across a porous matrix. Numerical simulations of this model show that ice thawing in the presence of convection is much faster than in the diffusive case and deepens at a constant velocity proportional to the soil permeability. A scaling argument is able to predict correctly the asymptotic velocity. Since in the convective regime the heat transport is mediated by the coherent motion of thermal plumes across the thawed layer, we find that the depth of the thawing interface becomes highly heterogeneous. |
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C08.00022: Abstract Withdrawn |
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