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The fluid transport in porous media is a critical property for oil and gas exploitation, construction engineering, and environmental protection. It is profoundly influenced by pore geometry and mineral properties. Currently, the Kozeny–Carman equation serves as the permeability prediction equation for porous media, established on the circular pores model. However, it fails to fully account for the impact of pore shape and mineral properties of the soil, leading to significant deviations between predicted and measured soil permeability results. In this paper, based on scanning electron microscope image and mercury intrusion porosimetry, the pores were divided into circular pores and narrow slit pores according to the ratios of pore area and circumference. Then, the quantitative expression of the two types of pores and their connectivity and tortuosity were given, and the circular and narrow slit composite pore model was used to describe the soil pore. Subsequently, the electrostatic potential of pore water was calculated by the Poisson–Boltzmann equation to consider the adsorption effect of minerals on pore water. Combined with the Navier–Stokes equation, the permeability prediction equation considering pore geometry, pore connectivity, and tortuosity and mineral properties was established. Finally, the experimental results illustrated that the theoretical prediction results were in good agreement with the experimental results. The proposed permeability prediction equation proves valuable for assessing and predicting the fluid transport in porous media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The components and pore structure of shale are complex due to the heterogeneous distribution of organic matter and the complex distributions of the minerals. The digital core, possessing the advantages of being economical and reusable, can be widely used to directly characterize the three dimensional (3D) micro-pore structure and to numerically simulate its physical properties. During construction of a digital shale core, it is a challenge to solve the multicomponent segmentation for the digital shale core, the contradiction between the sample size and image resolution, and the identification of the pore types in the 3D pore space. Therefore, an automatic workflow based on the gray gradient-maximum entropy-3D morphology was developed. The gray gradient-maximum entropy algorithm was used to segment each sub-image of focused ion beam scanning electron microscope images to generate segmented images. On this basis, the pore size distribution was optimized via 3D morphological erosion. Based on the concept of pore clusters, the organic and inorganic pores were identified using the 3D morphological method for the first time. The construction of a multicomponent digital shale core was realized. The 3D micro-pore structure of the organic and inorganic pores was characterized by pore connectivity, heterogeneity, and pore size distribution. The accuracy of the proposed method was verified using low-temperature N2 adsorption experiment data. The results of this study provide new insight into the multicomponent digital shale core construction and lay the foundation for the characterization of the petrophysical properties and micro-/nano-scale fluid flow simulations of shale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study carried out interfacial tension (IFT) testing, sand surface element analysis and scanning electron microscope imaging, rock–oil–emulsification system interaction testing, and microstructure, droplet size distribution, and stability of oil in water (O/W) emulsion to clarify the porous media flooding mechanism of a hydrophilic nano-SiO2 enhanced emulsification system. The results show that by adding a small amount of nano-SiO2 (0.01 wt. %) into an anionic surfactant fatty alcohol polyoxyethylene ether sodium hydroxypropyl sulfonate (AEOSHS) solution (0.5 wt. %), the IFT of oil–water was effectively reduced, the adsorption loss of AEOSHS on the formation sand surface was reduced by more than 70%, and the droplet size of the formed O/W emulsion was reduced by 50%. This greatly improves the effective concentration of AEOSHS and emulsifies the heavy oil ability in the formation away from the injection well. Moreover, the spreading ability of oil on the core surface is greatly reduced, and the width of the diffusion zone is narrowed. Meanwhile, a very clear dividing line of oil can be seen, which shows that the wettability of the core has changed to water wet. The stability of the formed O/W emulsion was further enhanced, and the coalescence and migration process of the droplet is extremely slow. The oil recovery of the AEOSHS + nano-SiO2 system can effectively increase 21.95% of the original oil in place. Both the sand-packed tube experiment and the microscopic visual oil flooding experiment show that the system can not only expand the swept volume but also improve the oil displacement efficiency, which means that the combined system can significantly improve the oil displacement effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oxide layer is easily formed on the surface of some metal droplets, which affects the dynamic behavior of droplet impact. In this paper, experiments were conducted for the impacting process of a molten aluminum droplet on a Teflon substrate. The thickness of surface oxide layer of aluminum droplets was controlled by varying oxygen concentrations in the gas atmosphere. The effects of oxygen concentration and Weber number on droplet spread, rebound, and splash behavior were investigated. The results show that the oxygen concentration in the environment directly affects the droplet impact behavior. The differences in the droplet retraction process at different oxygen concentrations are more significant than the spread process. Strong retraction causes droplet rebound (We = 17.11) and splash (We = 102.3) in hypoxic environments, whereas only weak retraction in air. The viscous dissipation of the droplet impact in different oxygen concentration environment is estimated by counting the droplet bounce height, and the dissipation increases with the increase in the oxygen concentration. The thickness of the oxide layer measured by scanning electron microscope became thinner as the oxygen concentration decreases and, accordingly, the aluminum droplet collisions show different dynamic behavior. The experimental results are analyzed and explained regarding the reduction in surface tension, the increase in viscous forces, and the shear-thinning properties which increase the viscous dissipation during retraction. Ryan model was used to predict the droplet maximum spreading factor ξ max with the Weber number to the power of 0.5, better than the energy conservation-based Pasandideh-Fard model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper investigates the relationships between non-acoustical parameters and sound absorption characteristics of the porous polyurethane foams based on the proposed simplistic unit cell model. The simplistic unit cell model, in which the inner shape of each unit cell is spherical and the nodes at the joint have a triangle concave cross section shape, is established from foaming process and scanning electron microscope (SEM) pictures of the porous polyurethane foams. The non-acoustical parameters and sound absorption characteristics of the porous polyurethane foams are expressed as functions of the geometric parameters of the simplistic unit cell model. The present predictions are in good agreement with the existing experiments and numerical results. Finally, the correlating relationships between the viscous and thermal effects and sound absorption coefficients of the porous polyurethane foams are discussed using the simplistic unit cell model. It is demonstrated that the simplistic unit cell model could describe the microstructure characterization and sound absorption properties of the porous polyurethane foams and the influence of the viscous effect on the sound absorption coefficients is more obvious than that of the thermal effect in the studied frequency ranges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]