Micro-PIV of viscoelastic fluid flow in microporous media

The present experimental investigation combines the bulk flow properties of polymer solutions and measurable rheological parameters as they flow through a distinctive micro-porous structure, with micro-PIV (micro-particle image velocimetry) to measure the velocity distribution and velocity fluctuations within individual pores of a novel porous glass structure. To investigate the effects of fluid elasticity at pore scale, aqueous solutions of a polyacrylamide (PAA) & polyethylene oxide (PEO) in the concentration range of 50–200 ppm, which were characterized in both shear and extensional flows using shear and capillary break-up extensional rheometers (CaBER) respectively, were used as working fluids. The velocity field measurement includes the velocity magnitude and fluctuation intensity in several different pores within the porous material across a Weissenberg number Wi range of approximately 0.01 to 1 for each of the test fluids. The global averaged fluctuation intensity increases with Wi but the critical value, which indicates the onset of significant unsteadiness (i.e. well above noise floor/Newtonian baseline) within the flow at pore scale gives an approximately constant value of Wi≈0.4, which is almost 40 times higher than the value that is observed in the pressure-drop measurements for the data to rise above the Newtonian base line. We therefore postulate that the enhanced pressure-drop behaviour of the bulk flow may not be due to local velocity fluctuations within the pores but due to mean flow effects, at least over a significant portion of the data (up to Wi≈0.4).