Fluid Invasion in Porous Media: Viscous Gradient Percolation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the dynamics of viscous invasion fronts in porous media depend on volume capacitance, revealing different scaling behaviors and providing numerical and experimental validation.

Contribution

It introduces a new effective scaling law for low volume capacitance regimes and supports it with network simulations and experimental data.

Findings

High volume capacitance leads to a specific scaling relation between front width and velocity.

Low volume capacitance regime exhibits a different effective scaling law.

Numerical simulations align with experimental observations on paper and glass beads.

Abstract

We suggest that the dynamics of stable viscous invasion fronts in porous media depends on the volume capacitance of the media. At high volume capacitance, our network simulations provide numerical evidence of a scaling relation between the front width and its velocity. In the low volume capacitance regime, we derive a new effective scaling supported by network simulations and is in agreement with previous experiments on imbibition in paper and collections of glass beads.