Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) is a process where microorganisms are used for tertiary oil recovery. Numerous mechanisms have been proposed in the literature through which microorganisms facilitate the mobilization of residual oil. Herein, we focus on the MEOR mechanisms of interfacial tension reduction (via biosurfactant) and bioclogging in water-wet...
We report here on recent developments and advances in pore-scale x-ray tomographic imaging of subsurface porous media. Our particular focus is on immiscible multi-phase fluid flow, i.e., the displacement of one immiscible fluid by another inside a porous material, which is of central importance to many natural and engineered processes....
Synchrotron-based tomographic datasets of oil–water drainage and imbibition cycles have been analyzed to quantify phase saturations and interfacial curvature as well as connected and disconnected fluid configurations. This allows for close observation of the drainage and imbibition processes, assessment of equilibrium states, and studying the effects of fluid phase disconnection...
Easier access to X-ray microtomography (lCT) facilities has provided much new insight from high-resolution imaging for various problems in porous media research. Pore space analysis with respect to functional properties usually requires segmentation of the intensity data into different classes. Image segmentation
is a nontrivial problem that may have a...
This work utilizes synchrotron-based x-ray computed microtomography (x-ray CMT) imaging to quantify
the volume and topology of supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO₂) on a pore-scale basis throughout the
primary drainage process of a 6 mm diameter Bentheimer sandstone core. Experiments were performed
with brine and scCO₂ at 8.3 MPa (1200 psi)...
The hierarchical organization of aggregates in soil is responsible for the presence of inter and intra-aggregate pores. This research aimed to investigate effects of soil surface liming, considering lime rates of 0, 10 and 15 t ha(-1), on the intra-aggregate porous system of soil aggregates with equivalent diameters of 2-4...
We consider computational modeling of flow with small and large velocities at
porescale and at corescale, and we address various challenges in simulation, upscaling, and modeling.
While our focus is on voxel-based data sets from real porous media imaging, our methodology is
verified first on synthetic geometries, and we analyze...