Abstract
Slow injection of non-wetting fluids (drainage) and strongly wetting fluids (strong imbibition) into porous media are two contrasting processes in many respects: the former must be forced into the pore space, while the latter imbibe spontaneously; the former occupy pore bodies, while the latter coat crevices and corners. These two processes also produce distinctly different displacement patterns. However, both processes evolve via a series of avalanche-like invasion events punctuated by quiescent periods. Here, we show that, despite their mechanistic differences, avalanches in strong imbibition exhibit all the features of self-organized criticality previously documented for drainage, including the correlation scaling describing the space-time statistics of invasion at the pore scale.
Highlights
Slow injection of non-wetting fluids and strongly wetting fluids into porous media are two contrasting processes in many respects: the former must be forced into the pore space, while the latter imbibe spontaneously; the former occupy pore bodies, while the latter coat crevices and corners
In slow drainage, when viscous forces are negligible, the invading fluid advances into clusters of pore bodies via intermittent avalanches[10,11], with waiting times between events and sizes of invasion clusters exhibiting scale-free behavior[6]
We use experiments and simulations to show that slow strong imbibition in porous media exhibits all of the same scale-free features of self-organized criticality (SOC) documented for drainage
Summary
Slow injection of non-wetting fluids (drainage) and strongly wetting fluids (strong imbibition) into porous media are two contrasting processes in many respects: the former must be forced into the pore space, while the latter imbibe spontaneously; the former occupy pore bodies, while the latter coat crevices and corners. In slow drainage, when viscous forces are negligible, the invading fluid advances into clusters of pore bodies via intermittent avalanches[10,11], with waiting times between events and sizes of invasion clusters exhibiting scale-free behavior[6]. We use experiments and simulations to show that slow strong imbibition in porous media exhibits all of the same scale-free features of SOC documented for drainage.
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