Visual Analysis of Two-Phase Flow Displacement Processes in Porous Media

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel visual analysis method for micro-scale two-phase flow in porous media, enabling detailed spatio-temporal comparisons and new insights into flow regimes based on experimental data.

Contribution

It presents a new abstract visual representation for analyzing porous media flow, facilitating comparison across different experiments and conditions.

Findings

New visualization technique for flow path analysis

Insights into viscous and capillary flow regimes

Enhanced understanding of flow dynamics at micro-scale

Abstract

We present the visual analysis of our novel parameter study of porous media experiments, focusing on gaining a better understanding of drainage processes on the micro-scale. We analyze the temporal evolution of extracted characteristic values, and discuss how to directly compare experiments that exhibit processes at different temporal scales due to varying boundary and physical conditions. To enable spatio-temporal analysis, we introduce a new abstract visual representation showing which paths through the porous media were occupied to what extent, e.g., allowing for classification into viscous and capillary regimes. This joint work of porous media experts and visualization researchers yields new insights regarding immiscible two-phase flow on the micro-scale toward the overarching goal of characterizing flow based on boundary conditions and physical fluid properties.