Two phase outflow from fibrous porous media: experiments and modeling

Two phase flow in porous media has been studied for its applications in oil recovery, CO2 storage, and other industrial processes. Much of the existing work focuses on what happens within the porous media, but two phase outflow form a porous media is relatively unexplored. In this work, we study coalescence filtration as an example of this type of flow. In coalescence filtration, the goal is to coalesce small droplets that are difficult to remove into larger ones that are easier to remove. Using a microfluidic setup, we investigate how the water (dispersed phase) and oil (continuous phase) flow rates through the filter media affect the produced droplet sizes. Our experiments show that the droplet size increases with the fractional water flow rate, and only weakly depends on the total flow rate through the filter media. We use mathematical modeling and scaling to explain these trends.