Understanding Diffusion-Controlled Bubble Growth in Porous Media Using Experiments and Simulations

Nucleation and subsequent expansion of gas bubbles in porous media is relevant to many applications, including oil recovery, carbon storage, and boiling. We have built an experimental setup using microfluidic chips to study the dynamics of bubble growth in porous media. Visualization experiments of the growth of carbon dioxide bubbles in a supersaturated dodecane solution were conducted. We show that bubble growth can take place in two distinct regimes depending on the pressure gradient applied across the porous medium. In one regime, bubbles expanding inside a porous medium displace the liquid phase until the cluster of the gas-filled pores becomes connected to the outlet at the critical gas saturation, which is used as a measure for the total liquid displacement. In the other regime, we observe that exsolved gas bubbles are swept out of the system by the flowing liquids due to the pressure gradient. Our experiments uniquely focus on the growth of a single bubble. A nonlinear pore-network model is implemented to simulate bubble growth along with a computational fluid dynamics model to simulate bubble breakup. We compare model predictions for bubble growth dynamics to our experimental results and present a parameter space to predict the behavior of growing bubbles inside porous media.

Emre is currently a research scientist for Engineering and Computational Physics department within the Energy Sciences laboratory at ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering. He earned a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Bogazici University in 2012 and 2014, respectively. His MS research was on the modeling of low-temperature plasma for electric propulsion applications. He earned a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. His PhD research focused on understanding the dynamics of Newtonian and non-Newtonian liquid jets and filament breakup using experiments and simulations. Emre joined ExxonMobil Research and Engineering in 2019. During his time in ExxonMobil, he has gained experience in a wide range of applications including enhanced oil recovery, microfluidics, chemical reactor design, slurry flows, fracture mechanics, low temperature plasmas, and acoustic sensing applications. His primary research centers on multiphase flows in porous media. He designs and conducts multiphase fluid flow experiments in lab-based systems representative of a range of flow conditions relevant to business problems to test hypotheses he develops and draw scientific conclusions into the fundamental behavior of these systems. He develops physics-based models of multiphase flow dynamics in heterogeneous porous media to address scientifically challenging questions at the frontier of both fluid dynamics and soft-matter physics.