Recent advances in spontaneous imbibition with different boundary conditions

Abstract

Spontaneous imbibition plays an important role in many practical processes, such as oil recovery, hydrology, and environmental engineering. The development in spontaneous imbibition goes fast in the past few years. In this paper, we focus on boundary conditions of spontaneous imbibition, which has important effects on spontaneous imbibition rate and efficiency. We introduce the fundamental physical mechanism of spontaneous imbibition with different boundary conditions by capillary model. Then, the studies of spontaneous imbibition in core scale are reviewed. The feature of spontaneous imbibition with different boundary conditions is discussed and the relative permeability for co- and counter-current imbibition is analyzed. The scaling of imbibition data with different boundary condition is also discussed by combination of experimental and numerical methods. At last, the analytical model of spontaneous imbibition is discussed. Cited as : Meng, Q., Cai, J. Recent advances in spontaneous imbibition with different boundary conditions. Capillarity, 2018, 1(3): 19-26, doi: 10.26804/capi.2018.03.01