Single-Phase Flow of Non-Newtonian Fluids in Porous Media

Abstract

The study of flow of non-Newtonian fluids in porous media is very important and serves a wide variety of practical applications in processes such as enhanced oil recovery from underground reservoirs, filtration of polymer solutions and soil remediation through the removal of liquid pollutants. These fluids occur in diverse natural and synthetic forms and can be regarded as the rule rather than the exception. They show very complex strain and time dependent behavior and may have initial yield-stress. Their common feature is that they do not obey the simple Newtonian relation of proportionality between stress and rate of deformation. Non-Newtonian fluids are generally classified into three main categories: time-independent whose strain rate solely depends on the instantaneous stress, time-dependent whose strain rate is a function of both magnitude and duration of the applied stress and viscoelastic which shows partial elastic recovery on removal of the deforming stress and usually demonstrates both time and strain dependency. In this article the key aspects of these fluids are reviewed with particular emphasis on single-phase flow through porous media. The four main approaches for describing the flow in porous media are examined and assessed. These are: continuum models, bundle of tubes models, numerical methods and pore-scale network modeling.

94 pages, 12 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (2)

• Non-Newtonian fluid flow through three-dimensional disordered porous media
• Pore-Scale Modeling of Non-Newtonian Flow in Porous Media

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Large deformations of a soft porous material
• Slip at Fluid-Solid Interface
• Newtonian Flow in Converging-Diverging Capillaries
• The Flow of Power-Law Fluids in Axisymmetric Corrugated Tubes
• Using Euler-Lagrange Variational Principle to Obtain Flow Relations for Generalized Newtonian Fluids
• Fluid Flow at Branching Junctions
• Comparing Poiseuille with 1D Navier-Stokes Flow in Rigid and Distensible Tubes and Networks
• Flow of non-Newtonian Fluids in Converging-Diverging Rigid Tubes
• The Yield Condition in the Mobilization of Yield-Stress Materials in Distensible Tubes