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Tomographic Study of Internal Erosion of Particle Flows in Porous Media

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Abstract

In particle-laden flows through porous media, porosity and permeability are significantly affected by the deposition and erosion of particles. Experiments show that the permeability evolution of a porous medium with respect to a particle suspension is not smooth, but rather exhibits significant jumps followed by longer periods of continuous permeability decrease. Their origin seems to be related to internal flow path reorganization by avalanches of deposited material due to erosion inside the porous medium. We apply neutron tomography to resolve the spatiotemporal evolution of the pore space during clogging and unclogging to prove the hypothesis of flow path reorganization behind the permeability jumps. This mechanistic understanding of clogging phenomena is relevant for a number of applications from oil production to filters or suffosion as the mechanisms behind sinkhole formation.

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Acknowledgements

The neutron imaging leading to the results was obtained under Project Proposal No. 20150745 at the NEUTRA beamline at PSI/SINQ. We acknowledge the excellent support of Peter Vontobel and Eberhard Lehmann. The authors are grateful for the financial support of the ETH Zurich under Grant No. 06 11-1 and the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant 319968-FlowCCS. A full data set used in this work can be found on researchgate.net under the creative commons license.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computational Physics for Engineering Materials, DBauG, ETH Zurich, Stefano-Franscini-Platz 3, 8093, Zurich, Switzerland

    Filippo Bianchi, Falk K. Wittel & Hans J. Herrmann

  2. Bayerisches Geoinstitut, University of Bayreuth, 95440, Bayreuth, Germany

    Marcel Thielmann

  3. Neutron Imaging and Activation Group, Laboratory for Neutron Scattering and Imaging, Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), 5232, Villigen, Switzerland

    Pavel Trtik

Authors
  1. Filippo Bianchi
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  2. Falk K. Wittel
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  3. Marcel Thielmann
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  4. Pavel Trtik
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  5. Hans J. Herrmann
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Correspondence to Falk K. Wittel.

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Bianchi, F., Wittel, F.K., Thielmann, M. et al. Tomographic Study of Internal Erosion of Particle Flows in Porous Media. Transp Porous Med 122, 169–184 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-017-0996-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-017-0996-8

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