Distribution and occurrence of localized-bursts in two-phase flow through porous media

This study examines the dynamics of two-phase drainage with experiments of air invasion into a translucent water-saturated porous medium, at low injection speeds. Air displaces the water by irregular bursts of motion, suddenly invading small portions of the medium. These periods of activity, followed by dormancy, are similar to descriptions of systems at a self-organized critical point, where a slight disturbance may induce an avalanche of activity. The fractal characteristics of the invading air structure at breakthrough are examined through static (box-counting) calculations of the air mass and through an evaluation of the time-dependent motion of the invading mass; results are compared with prior low-velocity two-phase studies in porous media. Dynamic, power-law scaling for invasion percolation is shown to be well suited to describing the structure of the invading fluid. To examine the applicability of self-organized criticality predictions to the invading fluid movement, a new image analysis procedure was developed to identify the location of individual bursting events during the drainage experiments. The predictions of self-organized criticality, namely the scaling of the occurrence of bursts to the mass of the bursts and a spatio-temporal randomness of different sized bursts, are also examined. Bursts of a wide range of sizes are shown to occur throughout the porous medium, over both time and space. The mass distribution of burst sizes is shown to be well described by self-organized criticality predictions, with an experimentally determined scaling exponent of 1.53.