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Duane H Smith

Publications and source records attributed to Duane H Smith.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Two-phase flow in porous media: Crossover from capillary fingering to compact invasion for drainage.

It had been predicted that the capillary fingering observed at small capillary numbers should change or cross over to compact invasion at larger capillary numbers or longer times [D. Wilkinson, Phys. Rev. A 34, 1380 (1986)]. We present results from pore-level modeling in two dimensions for the average position (related to the position of the interface) of the injected fluid as well as the width of the interface between the injected, nonwetting fluid and the defending, wetting fluid. These results are entirely consistent with the predicted crossover from the fractal flow characterized by invasion percolation with trapping (IPWT) to compact/linear/stable flow, where the position of the injected fluid advances linearly with time and where the width of the interface is constant. Furthermore, our results for the characteristic time, at which the crossover occurs, agree with the predictions of Wilkinson. To focus on the effect of capillary number, we are considering only viscosity-matched flows where both fluids have the same viscosities. To our knowledge, these are the first pore-level modeling results that quantitatively test the general predictions of Wilkinson for this capillary crossover in the case of drainage. Our modeling results are used to provide closed form expressions predicting the dependence of average position and interfacial width upon capillary number and time, regardless of the size of the system. The size scaling inherent in the crossover combined with our results locating the upper and lower bounds of the crossover regime enable us to predict the location of the crossover for two-dimensional systems of different size. These predictions are compared with flow patterns from experiments in the literature. The agreement between our predictions and the experimental flow patterns indicates that the experiments exhibit the same IPWT to compact crossover observed in our modeling.

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Crossover from capillary fingering to viscous fingering for immiscible unstable flow:Experiment and modeling.

Invasion percolation with trapping (IPT) and diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) are simple fractal models, which are known to describe two-phase flow in porous media at well defined, but unphysical limits of the fluid properties and flow conditions. A decade ago, Fernandez, Rangel, and Rivero predicted a crossover from IPT (capillary fingering) to DLA (viscous fingering) for the injection of a zero-viscosity fluid as the injection velocity was increased from zero. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 2958 (1991)]]. We have performed experiments in which air is injected into a glass micromodel to displace water. These experiments clearly demonstrate this crossover as the injection velocity of the air is increased. Furthermore, simulations, using our standard pore-level model, also support the predicted IPT-to-DLA crossover, as well as the predicted power-law behavior of the characteristic crossover length.

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Pore-level modeling of drainage: crossover from invasion percolation fingering to compact flow.

A pore-level model of drainage, which has been quantitatively validated, is used to study the effect of increased injection rate (i.e., increased capillary number) upon the flow, with matched-viscosity fluids. For small enough capillary number, the flows from the model correctly reproduce the flows from the invasion percolation with trapping (IPWT) model. As the capillary number is increased, the early-time flows mimic those of the IPWT-model, but then deviate towards compact flow at a characteristic time that decreases as the capillary number increases. That is, the larger the capillary number, the sooner the flow crosses over from IPWT flows towards compact (linear) flows.

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Thermodynamics of carbon dioxide hydrate formation in media with broad pore-size distributions.

Equilibrium pressures for the dissociation of carbon dioxide hydrates confined in silica gel pores of nominal radii 7.5, 5.0, and 3.0 nm were measured over a wide temperature range and were observed to be higher than those for bulk carbon dioxide hydrate. Models that have been previously reported in the literature are used to determine the pore radius involved in each equilibrium associated with these data, exactly reproducing the experimental equilibrium pressure. Based on these models, pore volume distributions are reconstructed and compared to those obtained from nitrogen desorption isotherms. This comparison indicates that in the nominal 7.5 nm pores the hydrate formed nearly uniformly in the available pores, while in the nominal 5.0 and 3.0 nm pores it did not.

Carbon Dioxide↗

River meandering dynamics.

The Ikeda, Parker, and Sawai river meandering model is reexamined using a physical approach employing an explicit equation of motion. For periodic river shapes as seen from above, a cross-stream surface elevation gradient creates a velocity shear that is responsible for the decay of small-wavelength meander bends, whereas secondary currents in the plane perpendicular to the downstream direction are responsible for the growth of large-wavelength bends. A decay length D=H/2C(f) involving the river depth H and the friction coefficient C(f) sets the scale for meandering, giving the downstream distance required for the fluid velocity profile to recover from changes in the channel curvature. Using this length scale and a time scale T, we explicitly trace the observed length scale invariance to the equations of motion, and predict similar time and velocity scale invariances. A general time-dependent nonlinear modal analysis for periodic rivers reveals that modes higher than the third mode are needed to describe upstream migration of bend apexes just before oxbow cutoff, and are important to accurate calculations of the time and sinuosity at cutoff.

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