HYDRODYNAMICS OF PARTICULATE MOTION IN POROUS-MEDIA

We develop a general model for flow of suspended particles in a porous medium. The model can take into account the effects of the morphology of the porous medium (including pore surface roughness and fractality), the chemistry of the flowing fluid, and all important forces between the particles and the pore surface. If surface deposition and pore plugging by size exclusion take place, the process is a percolation phenomenon which may belong to a different universality class than that of random percolation. The model is applied to two classes of problems, flow of solid, electrically charged colloidal particles, and that of stable emulsion droplets in a porous medium.