Sharif Digital Repository

Capillary pressure curves, which have been employed for a long period of time by researchers interested in pore size distribution, are commonly obtained from experimental measurements. The dynamic capillary pressure that influences the flow is affected by many factors including the pore size characteristics and pore scale dynamics. Hence, it is important to investigate the variation of the estimated pore size distribution with capillary number. In this study, a glass type micromodel is considered as the porous media sample. A parametric probability density function is proposed to express the pore size distribution of the porous model, which is also measured using an image analysis technique.... 

Abstract: We propose a novel method for producing unequal sized droplets through breakup of droplets. This method does not have the disadvantages of the available methods and also reduces the dependence of the droplets volume ratio on the inlet velocity of the system by up to 26 percent. The employed method for investigating the proposed system relies on 3D numerical simulation using the VOF algorithm and the results have been obtained with various valve ratios for both the micro- and nanoscale. The results indicate that the droplet length during the breakup process increases linearly with time. The droplet length at the nanoscale is smaller than that at the micro scale. It has been shown... 

Highlights: The objective of this work is to investigate the effects of the surfactants on the oil extraction from the dead ends through the numerical simulations and experimental evidences. The volume of fluid approach in the frame of the finite volume method has been used for numerical simulations in 2-D domain and experimental flooding tests have been done using a glassy micro-model. The effects of the water-oil, water-wall and oil-wall interfacial tensions have been investigated numerically and some results are compared to experimental flooding results. Simulations have been done in the cases of water-wet, neutralized-wet and oil-wet micro-models also. The numerical results show that in... 

Spontaneous imbibition, the capillary-driven process of displacing the nonwetting phase by the wetting phase in porous media, is of great importance in oil/gas recovery from matrix blocks of fractured reservoirs. The question of how properly scaling up the recovery by counter-current spontaneous imbibition has been the subject of extensive research over decades, and numerous scaling equations have been proposed. As a convention, the scaling equations are usually defined analytically by relating the early time squared recovery to squared pore volume. We show this convention does not apply to common scaling practices and, if used, causes nontrivial scatter in the scaling plots. We explain that... 

Spontaneous imbibition, the capillary-driven process of displacing the nonwetting phase by the wetting phase in porous media, is of great importance in oil/gas recovery from matrix blocks of fractured reservoirs. The question of how properly scaling up the recovery by counter-current spontaneous imbibition has been the subject of extensive research over decades, and numerous scaling equations have been proposed. As a convention, the scaling equations are usually defined analytically by relating the early time squared recovery to squared pore volume. We show this convention does not apply to common scaling practices and, if used, causes nontrivial scatter in the scaling plots. We explain that... 

Breakup of non-uniform droplets in an asymmetric T junction consisting of an inlet channel and two different-size outlet channels has been investigated numerically. Also, an analytical approach in the limit of the lubrication approximation has been extended to provide some analytical relations to study the system and verify the numerical results. Parameters that are important in the performance of the system have been determined and discussed. Our results indicate that smaller droplets can be produced by increasing the capillary number. As the geometry becomes symmetric the pressure drop decreases. Our results also reveal that the breakup time and the pressure drop for this system are... 

The positive coupling effect decreases the condensate saturation as a result of very high flow rates in vicinity of the wellbore. The current work challenges the notion that the positive rate effect does not lead in falling trend of condensate saturation around the wellbore in the case of rich gas composition. According to the results obtained from this parameter case study, four distinct trends would appear in the condensate saturation profile of both lean and rich gas compositions. These quadruplet trends are consistent and their occurrence is mainly related to the considered base capillary number (Ncb) which is likely dependent to the composition of the fluid  

Micro-magnetofluidics offers a promising tool to regulate the drop formation process with versatile applications in engineering and biomedicine. In the present study, on-demand ferrofluid drop generation at a T-junction is investigated utilizing a magnetic pulse. Also, a novel method for ferrofluid droplet formation is introduced using a non-uniform Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) magnetic field. A novel mechanism of drop generation named “beating regime” was seen for the first time in which the ferrofluid moves back and forth before the breakup. The effect of the magnetic induction, continuous phase flow rate, duty cycle, and applied frequency on the generation frequency and drop diameter was... 

Droplet breakup in symmetric T-junctions is one of the important phenomena in droplet microfluidics. Many studies have been done about the droplet breakup but none of them has provided a general analytical solution for the droplet breakup. In this study, we present an analytical solution to investigate the effect of important parameters such as the capillary number, droplet length, and channel widths ratio. The analytical solution is validated using the numerical simulation. Using the analytical equation and numerical results, we propose a generalized relationship. This general equation can be used as a rule of thumb for droplet breakup predictions with high accuracy. The results indicate... 

We investigate thin liquid film coating of substrates with trenches via lattice Boltzmann method. The effects of different parameters such as the capillary number, the contact angles and geometric parameters on the results are studied. Our results indicate that for trench depths greater than a critical size coating of the trench is not successful. The critical depth increases by decreasing the capillary number. Moreover we find height, width, capillary number and contact angle under which the coating is successful. The results have been compared with the available results and very close agreement has been achieved  

A Volume of Fluid (VOF) method is used to stdy the breakup of droplets in T-junction geometries. Symmetric T-junctions, which are used to produce equal size droplets and have many applications in pharmacy and chemical industries, are considered. Two important factors namely "breakup time" and "breakup length" that can improve the performance of these systems have been introduced. In addition a novel system which consists of an asymmetric T-junction is proposed to produce unequal size droplets. The effects of the channel width ratio and the capillary number on the size and length of the generated droplets and also the time of the generation have been studied and discussed. For simulation the... 

In this work, the effect of brine salinity on water-in-oil emulsion flow performance in porous media is studied as it imposes a significant challenge to oil production in the petroleum industry. A crude oil sample from an Iranian oilfield and synthetic brine with different salinities (40-140 g/L salt) are used. The results show that the emulsion viscosity and interfacial tension increase slightly with salinity, while they do not considerably affect the flow behavior. The emulsion stability analysis shows that larger w/o emulsion droplets are formed for higher brine salinity, which potentially block more pore spaces through straining and interception mechanisms. This phenomenon resulted in... 

The studies surrounding the concept of microdroplets have seen a dramatic increase in recent years. Microdroplets have applications in different fields such as chemical synthesis, biology, separation processes and micro-pumps. This study numerically investigates the effect of different parameters such as Capillary number, Length of droplets, and Magnetic Bond number on the splitting process of ferrofluid microdroplets in symmetric T-junctions using an asymmetric magnetic field. The use of said field that is applied asymmetrically to the T-junction center helps us control the splitting of ferrofluid microdroplets. During the process of numerical simulation, a magnetic field with various... 

Liquid-liquid two-phase flow is capable of boosting heat transfer in microdevices compared to the single-phase and gas-liquid flows. A thorough investigation is performed here to characterize the heat transfer in water-oil flow in a microtube. Finite element method along with the level-set model is employed for numerical simulation. A main part of this paper is devoted to studying the effect of wettability on the heat transfer performance. Four contact angles of 0°, 30°, 150°, and 180° are investigated, which revealed that the contact angle of 150° produces the highest Nusselt number (Nu). Triple points form at this contact angle, and the slugs slide on the wall, which results in more... 

The process of fluid flow displacement in porous media has recently gained great prominence owing to its widespread usage in a variety of industries, especially in the case of pore scale investigations. Although, many studies have been conducted to address pore-scale investigations in both modeling and experimental approaches, the role of interfacial tension and contact angle on pore-scale phenomena is less focused. In this work, direct pore-scale modeling was used to precisely examine the effect of interfacial tension and contact angle on the fluid flow at the microscale. Also, several pore-scale mechanisms, including Haines jump and dynamic breakup mechanisms, were observed. Therefore, the... 

A multicomponent lattice Boltzmann scheme is used to investigate the surface coating of substrates with two topographical features by a gravity-driven thin liquid film. The considered topographies are U- and V-shaped grooves and mounds. For the case of substrates with two grooves, our results indicate that for each of the grooves there is a critical width such that if the groove width is larger than the critical width, the groove can be coated successfully. The critical width of each groove depends on the capillary number, the contact angle, the geometry, and the depth of that groove. The second groove critical width depends on, in addition, the geometry and the depth of the first groove;... 

A number of forced gravity drainage experiments have been conducted using a wide range of the physical and operational parameters, wherein the type, length, and permeability of the porous medium as well as oil viscosity and injection rate were varied. Results indicate that an increase in the Bond number has a positive effect on oil recovery whereas the capillary number has an opposite effect. These trends were observed over a two-order of magnitude change in the value of the dimensionless groups. Furthermore, it was found that use of each number alone is insufficient to obtain a satisfactory correlation with recovery. A combined dimensionless group is proposed, which combines the effect of...