Fluid flow patterns in porous media with partially ordered microstructure

Abstract:

Natural granular porous media found in geosciences applications are disordered at the pore scale, which contributes to the interesting behavior that they exhibit including hydrodynamic dispersion, capillary pressure and wetting behavior, and various types of fingering. Many standard equations and models that have been developed for transport in porous media are based on the assumption of uniform disorder, randomly distributed parameters, and isotropic behavior. However, factors that cause partial ordering (e.g., settling of oblong grains, alignment of elongated particles, or packing structures near a boundary) can lead to anomalous flow behavior relative to the base case, when in turn requires different ways to understand and describe transport. In this work we examine the packing structure and fluid flow patterns in packings of equilateral cylindrical particles that are packed in a tube. The detailed packing structures are obtained experimentally from microCT experiments, and the flow patterns are simulated by numerical solution of the Stokes equations using the finite element method. This research is of interest in chemical engineering because this type of packing is used in catalytic reactors. However, the structures are also interesting from both a fundamental perspective and as prototypes for partially ordered natural materials because the packings undergo a transition from fully disordered internally to highly structured at the wall, and therefore provide insight into differences caused by the ordering.