Flow of an aqueous foam through a two-dimensional porous medium: a pore scale investigation

Flowing foams are used in many engineering and technical applications. A well-known application is oil recovery. Another one is the remediation of polluted soil: the foam is injected into the ground in order to mobilize chemical species present in the medium. Apart from potential interesting physico-chemical and biochemical properties, foams have peculiar flow properties that might be of benefit to the application. We address here this physical aspect of the topic. As a precursor to the study of foam flow through a complex porous material, we first study the behavior of an aqueous two-dimensional foam flowing through a medium consisting of two parallel channels with different widths, at fixed medium porosity, that is, at fixed total combined width of the two channels. The flow velocity, and hence flux, in each channel is measured by analyzing images of the flowing foam. It is then compared to a theoretical model, the basic assumption of which is that the pressure drop along a channel is identical for both channels. This pressure drop both consists of (i) a dynamic pressure drop, which is controlled by bubble-wall friction and depends on the foam velocity in the channel, and (ii) a capillary pressure drop over the bubble films that emerge at the channel outlet, the latter pressure drop being controlled by the radius of curvature of the bubble film. Based on this assumption, the dependence of the ratio of the foam velocities in the two channels is inferred as a function of the channel width ratio. It compares well to the measurements and shows that the flow behavior is highly dependent on the foam structure within the narrowest of the two channels, especially when a "bamboo" structure is obtained. Consequently, the flux in a channel is found to have a more complicated relation to the channel width than expected for the flow of a standard Newtonian fluid in the same geometry. We provide a comparison to this reference configuration. We then study the flow of the same foam into a two-dimensional porous medium consisting of cylinders that have been positioned randomly between the two plates of the Hele-Shaw cell described above. Intermittent flow and non-stationarity of the velocity field are observed under permanent controlled inlet flow. Flow channeling is also different from what would be expected for a Newtonian fluid, which allows a different part of the pore population to be visited. Foam flow in a two-dimensional porous medium;