4.7 Article

Direct Visualization of Evaporation in a Two-Dimensional Nanoporous Model for Unconventional Natural Gas

Journal

ACS APPLIED NANO MATERIALS
Volume 1, Issue 3, Pages 1332-1338

Publisher

AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acsanm.8b00064

Keywords

evaporation; Knudsen flow; vapor transport; nanoporous; nanofluidics; shale gas

Funding

  1. Schlumberger Canada Ltd.
  2. Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada through a Collaborative Research and Development Grant [477200-14]
  3. Alberta Innovates [3189]
  4. E.W.R Steacie Memorial Fellowship [492246-2016]
  5. Discovery Grants program [2015-06701]
  6. Discovery Accelerator [477898-2015]
  7. Canada Research Chairs program [230931]
  8. Ontario Graduate Scholarship
  9. Canada Foundation for Innovation
  10. Ontario Research Fund

Ask authors/readers for more resources

Evaporation at the nanoscale is critical to many natural and synthetic systems including rapidly emerging unconventional oil and gas production from nanoporous shale reservoirs. During extraction processes, hydrocarbons confined to nanoscopic pores (ranging from one to a few hundred nanometers in size) can undergo phase change as pressure is reduced. Here, we directly observe evaporation in two-dimensional (2D) nanoporous media at the sub-10 nm scale. Using an experimental procedure that mimics pressure drawdown during shale oil/gas production, our results show that evaporation takes place at pressures significantly lower than predictions from the Kelvin equation (maximum deviation of 11%). We probe evaporation dynamics as a function of superheat and find that vapor transport resistance dominates evaporation rate. The transport resistance is made up of both Knudsen and viscous flow effects, with the magnitude of the Knudsen effect being approximately twice that of the viscous effects here. We also observe a phenomenon in sub-10 nm confinement wherein lower initial liquid saturation pressures trigger discontinuous evaporation, resulting in faster evaporation rates.

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