Linking pressure and saturation through interfacial areas in porous media

Representative elementary volume estimation for porosity, moisture saturation, and air-water interfacial areas in unsaturated porous media: Data quality implications

[1] Achieving a representative elementary volume (REV) has become a de facto criterion for demonstrating the quality of lCT measurements in porous media systems. However, the data quality implications of an REV requirement have not been previously examined. In this work, deterministic REVs for porosity, moisture saturation (SW), and air-water interfacial area (AI) were estimated using a set of ...

Influence of wettability and saturation on liquid-liquid interfacial area in porous media.

The knowledge of the area of interfaces between phases is important to understand and quantify many flow and transport processes in porous media. In this work, we apply the interfacial tracer technique to study the dependence of fluid-fluid interfacial area on saturation and wettability. The interfacial area between the wetting and the nonwetting phases (brine and decane) in unconsolidated poro...

X-ray microtomography determination of air-water interfacial area-water saturation relationships in sandy porous media.

In this work, total smooth air-water interfacial areas were measured for a series of nine natural and model sandy porous media as a function of water saturation using synchrotron X-ray microtomography. Interfacial areas decreased linearly with water satuation, while the estimated maximum interfacial area compared favorably to the media geometric surface areas. Importantly, relative interfacial ...

Saturation dependence of dispersion in porous media.

In this study, we develop a saturation-dependent treatment of dispersion in porous media using concepts from critical path analysis, cluster statistics of percolation, and fractal scaling of percolation clusters. We calculate spatial solute distributions as a function of time and calculate arrival time distributions as a function of system size. Our previous results correctly predict the range ...

High temperature and pressure reactive flows through porous media