Effects of dynamic contact angle on immiscible two-phase flow displacement in angular pores: A computational fluid dynamics approach

Abstract

Analyzing multiphase flow in capillaries can provide valuable insight into fluid flow modeling in different branches of engineering, particularly petroleum engineering, carbon dioxide sequestration, polymer processing, and drug delivery. Wall wettability is one of the most critical parameters significantly affecting fluid distribution within a capillary system. The tendency for wettability is usually described using the contact angle. In this research, the impact of dynamic contact angles was investigated, and the results were compared with published experimental data. For this purpose, a three-dimensional numerical scheme using computational fluid dynamics was developed to simulate two-phase immiscible flow through angular pores at micro-scale. In comparison with previously published numerical simulations assuming a static contact angle, a better agreement between the experimental data and numerical simulations was observed in this study. Results of this study demonstrated that using dynamic contact angle models can reduce the numerical error from 150% to 35%. Therefore, it can be concluded that the effects of dynamic contact angles on viscous dominant flows are not negligible. In addition, analyzing multiphase flow within different angular pores demonstrated the importance of dynamic contact angle implementation for angular pores with sharp corners. The accuracy and computational efficiency of the proposed numerical scheme were improved using a dynamic mesh adaptive refinement technique. This method improved the numerical simulations' accuracy while simultaneously reducing computational costs.