Numerical and experimental study of the effect of wettability and capillary number on the efficiency of oil displacement in a pore doublet model

A numerical and experimental study of the influence of viscous and capillary forces on the characteristics of multiphase flow in the pore doublet model, which is one of the most well-known elementary models of the pore space, has been carried out. The OpenFOAM platform was used for numerical simulation. A multiparametric analysis of the process of oil displacement by various agents in the pore doublet model was carried out with varying values of the wettability of the pore surface, pressure drop, surface tension coefficient, and the ratio of the sizes of the channels of the pore doublet. It is shown that the obtained results of numerical simulation are in good agreement with the experimental data for the pore doublet model in the case of a hydrophobic surface at various values of the capillary number. The physical model of the pore doublet is implemented in a microfluidic chip fabricated using the soft lithography method. The proposed numerical-experimental microfluidic approach makes it possible to carry out a numerical study of two-phase filtration in models of a porous medium corresponding to laboratory studies, as well as to scale the results obtained by the characteristic core sizes.