Imbibition of liquids in fibrous porous media

Abstract

The present paper proposes a theoretical and experimental approach to predict the imbibition process into a fibrous porous media where the displacement of air by the liquid is seen to be characterized by the presence of a clearly-defined liquid front. The imbibition process is defined as the absorption of liquid in a porous media, mainly due to surface tension. In the most imbibition applications, the Washburn equation is used to predict the rise of the liquid front as a function of time when the inertial and gravitational energies can be neglected. The objectives of this article are oriented to the modeling process of the imbibition through highly compressible porous layers, and model validation through experimental simulations which were done on different unwoven porous materials. It was shown that the imbibition predictions by the theoretical model are in agreement with the experimental results.