Transport of emulsions in porous media is relevant to several subsurface applications. Many enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes lead to emulsion formation and as a result conformance originating in the flow of a dispersed phase may arise. In some EOR processes, emulsion is injected directly as a mobility control agent. Modeling the flow of emulsion in porous media is extremely challenging due...

Designing a reliable plant growth system for crop production in space requires the understanding of pore fluid distribution in porous media under microgravity. The objective of this experimental investigation, which was conducted aboard NASA KC-135 reduced gravity flight, is to study possible particle separation and the distribution of discontinuous wetting fluid in porous media under micrograv...

In the brain-cell microenvironment, the movement of ions is by diffusion when there is not any electrical activity in either the cells or the externally applied electric field. In this complex medium, the primary constraints on long-range diffusion are due to the geometrical properties of the medium, especially tortuosity and volume fraction, which are lumped parameters that incorporate local g...

The scaled particle theory (SPT) is applied to describe thermodynamic properties of a hard sphere (HS) fluid in random porous media. To this purpose, we extended the SPT2 approach, which has been developed previously. The analytical expressions for the chemical potential of an HS fluid in HS and overlapping hard sphere (OPH) matrices, sponge matrix, and hard convex body (HCB) matrix are obtaine...

Spontaneous imbibition happens in many natural and chemical engineering processes in which the mean advancing front usually follows Lucas-Washburn's law. However it has been found that the scaling law does not apply in many cases. There have been few criteria to determine under what conditions the Washburn law works. The effect of gravity on spontaneous imbibition in porous media was investigat...

To evaluate the variability of multiphase flow properties of porous media at the pore scale, it is necessary to acquire a number of representative samples of the void-solid structure. While modern x-ray computer tomography has made it possible to extract three-dimensional images of the pore space, assessment of the variability in the inherent material properties is often experimentally not feas...

Simulating flow of a Bingham fluid in porous media still remains a challenging task as the yield stress may significantly alter the numerical stability and precision. We present a Lattice-Boltzmann TRT scheme that allows the resolution of this type of flow in stochastically reconstructed porous media. LB methods have an intrinsic error associated to the boundary conditions. Depending on the sch...

Understanding the flow of incompressible fluids through porous media plays a crucial role in many technological applications such as enhanced oil recovery and geological carbon-dioxide sequestration. Several natural and synthetic porous materials exhibit multiple pore-networks, and the classical Darcy equations are not adequate to describe the flow of fluids in these porous materials. Mathemati...

Colloid transport in subsurface has received considerable attention recently because mobile colloids can facilitate the transport of heavy metals in soils to contaminate groundwater. Many studies on colloid mobility in the subsurface consider soils as well-defined porous media. Though similar in many aspects, soils are different from well-defined porous media. The authors emphasize the impacts ...

Transport phenomena in porous media are pertinent to thermal and thermochemical processes for power and fuel generation using concentrated solar energy. The porous media serve as insulator, radiant absorbers, heat exchangers, catalyst carriers, reactants, and/or reaction sites. Volume-averaging models for porous media, commonly applied for process simulations and optimization, rely heavily on t...