Meniscus arrest dominated imbibition front
roughening in porous media with elongated pores
Heiko Rieger,
Zeinab Sadjadi,
Christian Thome
During spontaneous imbibition, a wetting liquid is drawn into a porous medium by
capillary forces. Recently, anomalous scaling properties of front broadening during spontaneous
imbibition of water in Vycor glass, a nanoporous medium, were reported. The mean height and
the width of the propagating front increase with time t both proportional to
t 1/2 . We argue
that this anomalously large roughening exponent of β = 1 / 2
is due to long-lasting meniscus
arrests, when at pore junctions the meniscus propagation in one or more branches comes to
a halt when the Laplace pressure of the meniscus exceeds the hydrostatic pressure within the
junction. From this hypothesis we derive the scaling relations for the emerging arrest time
distribution in random pore networks and show that the average front width is proportional to
the height yielding a roughness exponent of exactly β = 1 / 2 as measured in the Vycor glass
imbibition experiments. Extensive simulations of a random pore network model confirm these
predictions. Finally, using a micro
uidic setup as well as molecular dynamics simulations on
the nanoscale, the basic hypothesis of the scaling theory is confirmed by demonstrating the
existence of arrest events in Y-shaped junctions, analyzing them quantitatively and comparing
them with the theoretical predictions.
[1] H. Rieger, C. Thome and Z. Sadjadi Meniscus arrest dominated imbibition front roughening in porous media with elongated pores |
J. Phys. Conf. Serie 638, 012007 (2015)
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