Capillary and Viscous Fracturing During Drainage in Porous Media

Abstract

Detailed understanding of the couplings between fluid flow and solid deformation in porous media is crucial for the development of novel technologies relating to a wide range of geological and biological processes. A particularly challenging phenomenon that emerges from these couplings is the transition from fluid invasion to fracturing during multiphase flow. Previous studies have shown that this transition is highly sensitive to fluid flow rate, capillarity, and the structural properties of the porous medium. However, a comprehensive characterization of the relevant fluid flow and material failure regimes does not exist. Here, we used our newly developed Multiphase Darcy-Brinkman-Biot framework to examine the transition from drainage to material failure during viscously-stable multiphase flow in soft porous media in a broad range of flow, wettability, and solid rheology conditions. We demonstrate the existence of three distinct material failure regimes controlled by non-dimensional numbers that quantify the balance of viscous, capillary, and structural forces in the porous medium.

For associated code files, see https://github.com/Franjcf

References in corpus (3)

• Fluid-driven deformation of a soft granular material
• Crack formation and self-closing in shrinkable, granular packings
• Computational modeling of active deformable membranes embedded in 3D flows

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The Impact of Sub-Resolution Porosity on Numerical Simulations of Multiphase Flow
• Fluid-fluid phase separation in a soft porous medium
• Crossover from viscous fingering to fracturing in cohesive wet granular media: a photoporomechanics study
• Robust finite element methods and solvers for the Biot--Brinkman equations in vorticity form
• Modeling Multiphase Flow Through and Around Multiscale Deformable Porous Materials
• Consistent multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann method for the volume averaged Navier-Stokes equations