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 nondimensional numbers that quantify the balance of viscous, capillary, and structural forces in the porous medium, in agreement with previous experiments and granular simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to effectively decouple the effects of viscous and capillary forces on fracturing mechanics. Last, we examine the effects of consolidation or compaction on said dimensional numbers and the system's propensity to fracture.
Highlights
Multiphase flow in deformable porous media is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural and engineered systems that underlies key processes in water and energy resource engineering and materials science, including membrane filtration, soil wetting/drying, enhanced hydrocarbon recovery, and geologic carbon sequestration [1,2,3]
The deformation regimes observed in the previous experiments can be delineated by two simple nondimensional parameters that quantify the balance between viscous pressure drop, solid softness, and capillary entry pressure
To evaluate the impact of this simplification on the results shown in Figs. 3 and 4, we carried out additional simulations for all four regimes with a deformation-dependent capillary entry pressure based on a simplified form of the Leverett J-function where pc,0 = p∗c,0(φs/φsavg)n, p∗c,0 is the capillary pressure at φs = φsavg, and n > 0 is a sensitivity parameter [53,54]
Summary
Multiphase flow in deformable porous media is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural and engineered systems that underlies key processes in water and energy resource engineering and materials science, including membrane filtration, soil wetting/drying, enhanced hydrocarbon recovery, and geologic carbon sequestration [1,2,3]. Fundamental studies have generated detailed information on the dynamics that arise from fluid-solid couplings beyond the ideal poroelastic regime, including fracturing and cracking of granular and continuous systems [20,21,22] These studies have shown that the main parameters controlling the deformation of a porous solid by single phase flow are the material softness and the magnitude of the fluid-solid momentum transfer. To the best of our knowledge, no experimental or numerical investigation has simultaneously explored and decoupled the effects that flow rate, wettability, and deformability have on fracturing mechanics and/or identified the controlling parameters that relate all three properties within a single phase diagram This is partially due to the fact that the associated parameter space is very large. This suggests that, for ductile materials such as those represented here, a volume-averaged representation may be sufficient to capture the onset and propagation of fractures at the continuum scale
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