Capillary Rise of Water in Nanoporous Glass as Revealed by X-ray Tomography-Based Lattice-Boltzmann Simulations

• Published in: Album of Porous Media p. 49
• Main Authors: Dittrich, Guido, de Souza e Silva, JulianaMartins, de Oliveira, Cristine Santos, Bakshian, Sahar, Kityk, Andriy V., Steinhart, Martin, Enke, Dirk, RalfWehrspohn, Shokri, Nima, Huber, Patrick
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• ISBN: 9783031237997; 3031237994
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-23800-0_35

Imbibition in a nanoporous solid is governed by a complex interplay of the liquid’s viscosity, the liquid-solid interaction and the geometry of the porous medium. Here a tomography of a controlled pore glass (Vycor, CPG) provides the base for Lattice-Boltzmann computer simulations (L-B) of this process from the singlepore up to the Darcy scale. (a) CPG with 400 nm-sized pores reconstructed from X-ray tomography. (b) Representation of the empty pore space. The color shades indicate the pore size distribution. (c) L-B capillaryrise simulation snapshot based on the tomography [1]. (d) Photographic snapshots during water imbibition into 4 nm-CPG [2, 3]. The imbibition is characterized by a Lucas-Washburn square-root-of-time front advancement along with a front broadening that follows in agreement with the L-B simulations also a square-root-of-time dynamics, see white light scattering front [3]. Note that the X-ray tomography is 100 times scaled down to represent the 4 nm-CPG in the simulation, as justi_ed by the scale invariant spinodal demixing-based pore formation in CPGs.