Spontaneous Selective Preconcentration Leveraged by Ion Exchange and Imbibition through Nanoporous Medium

Switchable imbibition in nanoporous gold

Spontaneous imbibition enables the elegant propelling of nano-flows because of the dominance of capillarity at small length scales. The imbibition kinetics are, however, solely determined by the static host geometry, the capillarity, and the fluidity of the imbibed liquid. This makes active control particularly challenging. Here we show for aqueous electrolyte imbibition in nanoporous gold that...

Selective Transport of Propylene by Silver Ion Complex Through an Immobilized Liquid Membrane

Interface pinning in spontaneous imbibition.

Evaporation and gravity induced pinning in spontaneous imbibition are examined within a phase field formalism. Evaporation is introduced via a nonconserving term and gravity through a convective term that constrains the influx of liquid. Their effects are described by dimensionless coupling constants epsilon and g, respectively. From liquid conservation, the early time behavior of the average i...

Oil Recovery by Spontaneous Imbibition from Weakly Water-Wet Rocks

Spontaneous imbibition is of special importance to oil recovery from fractured reservoirs. Laboratory measurements of volume of liquid imbibed versus time are often used in the prediction of oil recovery. Imbibition measurements also provide a useful approach to the complex problem of characterizing the wetting properties of porous media. Correlation of a large body of data for imbibition of br...

Nonlocal dynamics of spontaneous imbibition fronts.

We have studied spontaneous imbibition fronts generated by capillary rise between two roughened glass plates, the separation d of which varied between 10 and 50 microm. Perfect agreement with Washburn's law was obtained. We have determined the roughness exponent chi of the fronts, and found chi=0.81+/-0.01 for small length scales. Above a certain crossover length xi, it reached chi=0.58+/-0.04,...