Two-phase flows in highly permeable structures

With M. Quintard and various industry partners (Air Liquide, BRGM, ADEME, IRSN).

Many industrial and natural processes involve flow in highly permeable media, such as heat and mass exchangers, distillation columns, canopies or networks of urban canyons.

As the flow regime in porous media is strongly dependent upon the distribution of pore sizes, assumptions used for modelling and upscaling flow equations in low permeability structures may not hold for systems with very large pores.

In particular, we usually think about two-phase flows in porous media as occurring at low Reynolds, capillary, Weber and Bond numbers.

But what happens when this is not the case?

Lift effect for two-phase flows in porous media (experiments and simulations)

Lift effect for two-phase flows in porous media (dots are experiments, the dash line corresponds to the standard generalized Darcy's law and the continuous line to our modified model with coupling terms & without inertial effects)

What we do

Using computational fluid dynamics, volume averaging and laboratory experiments, we develop new models that apply to such systems.

We have recently worked on flow models that, unlike the generalized Darcy’s law, take into account mass and momentum exchanges between the different phases. Check out our small review on the topic!

Such descriptions are necessary to describe important features of two-phase flows in highly permeable structures, such as the lift effect observed in recent experiments.

Also check Sylvain Pasquier’s PhD thesis!

Two-phase flows in highly permeable structures

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