Journal
JOURNAL OF COLLOID AND INTERFACE SCIENCE
Volume 561, Issue -, Pages 173-180Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2019.11.105
Keywords
Wettability; Porous media; Contact angle; Multiphase flow; Gauss-Bonnet theorem; Interfacial curvature; Geometric state of fluids
Categories
Funding
- Australian Government
- ARC [DE180100082]
- DOE Office of Science User Facility [DEAC05-000R22725]
- Australian Research Council [DE180100082] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
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Hypothesis: Wetting phenomena play a key role in flows through porous media. Relative permeability and capillary pressure-saturation functions show a high sensitivity to wettability, which has different definitions at the continuum- and pore-scale. We hypothesize that the wetting state of a porous medium can be described in terms of topological arguments that constrain the morphological state of immiscible fluids, which provides a direct link between the continuum-scale metrics of wettability and pore-scale contact angles. Experiments: We perform primary drainage and imbibition experiments on Bentheimer sandstone using air and brine. Topological properties, such as Euler characteristic and interfacial curvature are measured utilizing X-ray micro-computed tomography at irreducible air saturation. We also present measurements for the United States Bureau of Mines (USBM) index, capillary pressure and pore-scale contact angles. Additional studies are performed using two-phase Lattice Boltzmann simulations to test a wider range of wetting conditions. Findings: We demonstrate that contact angle distributions for a porous multiphase system can be predicted within a few percent difference of directly measured pore-scale contact angles using the presented method. This provides a general framework on how continuum-scale data can be used to describe the geometrical state of fluids within porous media. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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