Characterization of Transport-Enhanced Phase Separation in Porous Media Using a Lattice-Boltzmann Method

Figure 3

(a) Snapshots of non-wetting phase (droplets) at steady state for different surface tensions (, , and ) and . (b) Characterization of droplet shape at different surface tensions using volume-to-surface-area, , versus “spherical radius” of individual droplets, , where and are the volume and surface area of individual droplets. For a spherical droplet, , indicated by the black solid line. Results are plotted for all simulations with saturations of . Inset: individual droplet volumes normalized by the averaged pore size of the medium are plotted against the apparent Capillary number, , for these three surface tensions. The size of the symbols is proportional to the reciprocal of droplet saturation; i.e., the higher the droplet saturation, the smaller the symbol.

(a)

(b)