Pore-scale forces have a significant effect on the macroscopic behaviour of multiphase flow through porous media. This paper studies the effect of these forces using a new volume-of-fluid based finite volume method developed for simulating two-phase flow directly on micro-CT images of porous media. An analytical analysis of the relationship between the pore-scale forces and the Darcy-scale pres...

Extreme values of earth, environmental, ecological, physical, biological, financial and other variables often form outliers to heavy tails of empirical frequency distributions. Quite commonly such tails are approximated by stretched exponential, log-normal or power functions. Recently there has been an interest in distinguishing between extreme-valued outliers that belong to the parent populati...

Streaming potential across a porous medium is induced by a fluid flow due to an electric double layer between a solid and a fluid. When an acoustic wave propagates through a porous medium, the wave pressure generates a relative movement between the solid and the fluid. The moving charge in the fluid induces an electric field due to the seismoelectric conversion. In order to investigate the stre...

[1] A novel data-driven artificial neural network (ANN) that quantitatively combines large numbers of multiple types of soft data is presented for performing stochastic simulation and/or spatial estimation. A counterpropagation ANN is extended with a radial basis function to estimate parameter fields that reproduce the spatial structure exhibited in autocorrelated parameters. Applications invol...

Numerical meshes of both cork and carbon fibre ablative materials in their virgin and pyrolised states, with realistic porosity and tortuosity, have been created from micro-computed tomography (μCT) scans. The porosity of each material has been calculated from the μCT scans and used to extract smaller representative sample volumes to perform numerical simulations on. Direct simulation Monte Car...

Microbial plugging has been proposed as an effective low cost method of improving sweep efficiency by reducing permeability of water-swept regions of a reservoir. To optimize the field implementation of this method, better mechanistic and volumetric understanding of biofilm growth within a porous medium is needed. In particular, the engineering design hinges upon a quantitative relationship bet...

We present new laboratory observations of an advancing boiling front radiating from an injection point in a simulated geothermal reservoir. The Berea sandstone model is a 26 cm cube that is either heated to a dry 125°C, or saturated with 145°C steam in two separate testing configurations. Cool water is applied at the sample center, and the advancing boiling front is identified by a radial array...

We introduce the medial axis as a tool in the analysis of geometric structure of void space in porous media. The medial axis traces the fundamental geometry of the void pathways. We describe an algorithm for generating the medial axis of the void structure from digitized three dimensional images of porous media obtained from X ray CAT scans. The medial axis is constructed during an iterative er...

[1] We study macroscopic (centimeter scale) dispersion using pore-scale network simulation. A Lagrangian-based transport model incorporating flow and diffusion is applied in a diamond lattice of throats with square cross section whose radius distribution is the same as computed for Berea sandstone. We use physically consistent rules using a combination of stream-tube routing and ideal mixing to...