The critical behavior of the clogging process in a porous medium

Abstract

Flows through porous media can carry suspended and dissolved materials. These sediments may deposit inside the pore-space and alter its geometry. In turn, the changing pore structure modifies the preferential flow paths, resulting in a strong coupling between structural modifications and transport characteristics. Here, we compare two different models that lead to channel obstruction as a result of subsequent deposition. The first model randomly obstructs pore-throats across the porous medium, while the second model always blocks the pore-throat with the highest flow rate. By subsequently closing pores, we find that the breakdown of the permeability follows a power-law scaling, whose exponent depends on the obstruction model. The pressure jumps that occur during the obstruction process follow a universal power-law distribution with the same scaling exponent as the avalanche size distribution of invasion percolation. The fact that this exponent is also independent of the model suggests that the clogging processes and invasion percolation may belong to the same universality class.