Transients in water content are well-known to mobilize microorganisms that are retained in the vadose zone. However, there is no consensus on the relative importance of drainage and imbibition events on microorganism release. To overcome this limitation, we have systematically studied the release of Escherichia coli D21g during cycles of drainage and imbibition under various solution chemistry ...

Directional imbibition of oils (hexadecane, tetradecane, and dodecane) and water is demonstrated on a chemically patterned silicon micropillar array. Four different directional imbibition types are shown: unidirectional, two types of bidirectional and tridirectional imbibition. The surfaces consist of a silicon micropillar array with an overlaid surface chemistry pattern. This configuration lea...

Imbibition during the first few hours is crucial for the success of seed germination process. The effect of water deficit after 2 and 8 hours (h) of imbibition of seeds of durum wheat was studied in terms of reserve mobilization, total sugars and proteins at 24, 48 and 72 h post treatment. Imbibition for 2 and 8 h was not enough to support normal mobilization of seed reserves and solubilization...

[1] Electric field bursts were passively observed when a nonwetting fluid displaced a wetting fluid in a porous material (drainage) as well as during imbibition experiments. A sandbox experiment was conducted to study these electrical disturbances using a network of very sensitive nonpolarizing electrodes located at the top surface of the tank. Drainage exhibited many more electrical bursts, wi...

Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Spontaneous Imbibition in Nanopores and Recovery of Asphaltenic Crude Oils Using Surfactants for EOR Applications — We present Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations of the imbibition process in nanopores in case of two different mechanisms of the wettability modification. We compare the imbibition of an aqueous surfactant solution into an oil-wet pore driven by su...

Coal-measure mudstone is a typical dual-porosity media, and grouting in a matrix system is dominantly controlled by the imbibition effect for silica sol. This paper studies the imbibition effect using mudstone in the Huaibei mining area and silica sol as grouting material as an example. Groutability, driving force, and diffusion difficulty affecting the imbibition effect were tested by a mercur...

Rapid increases in activities and components of mitochondrial particles isolated from cotyledons of Pisum sativum var. Alaska during the early stage of germination are described. Respiratory rate of the cotyledons increased rapidly as hydration proceeded. A similar but slightly delayed increase in respiratory activity of the isolated mitochondrial fraction was observed. The respiratory control ...

A set of experiments of spontaneous imbibition for water displacing oil or a mixture of water and glycerine displacing oil, on flat and rectangular Hele-Shaw cells, is reported. Visualization of the imbibition process allowed the knowledge of the evolution of three basic kinematical variables: the active oil area, the interfacial length and the mean velocity of displacement. A derived kinematic...

Several sugar mills in southern Africa have adverse fuel balances for various reasons, and end up burning enormous amounts of coal. Some of the reasons for this are discussed, and two in particular are analysed in detail: time efficiency and imbibition. The variables that are directly related to the energy efficiency of a sugar mill are listed and their relative effects are discussed. The effec...