Intermittent Dynamics of Slow Drainage Experiments in Porous Media: Characterization Under Different Boundary Conditions

Abstract

The intermittent dynamics of slow drainage flows in a porous medium is studied experimentally. This kind of two-phase flow is characterized by a rich burst activity and our setup allows us to characterize those bursts directly via images of the flow and pressure measurements. Two different boundary conditions were analyzed: controlled withdrawal rate (CWR) and controlled imposed pressure (CIP). We have characterized geometrical and statistical properties of the bursts from images and pressure measurements. We have shown that in spite of leading to similar final invasion patterns, some dynamical features of the invasion differ considerably between the CWR and CIP boundary conditions. In particular, their pressure signatures are very distinct, which then translates into very distinct features on the power spectrum density of the pressure signals. A fully integrable analytical framework is presented which successfully describes the scaling features of the power spectrum for the CIP case.