CAREER: Theoretical and Experimental Analysis of Fluid Injection into Granular Media-Failure and Flow Patterns

职业：流体注入颗粒介质失效和流动模式的理论和实验分析

• 批准号: 1055882
• 负责人: Haiying Huang
• 金额: $ 40.82万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-06-01 至 2017-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1055882&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Theoretical; Experimental; Analysis; Fluid

The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award is to develop an integrated theoretical and experimental program to characterize the process of fluid injection into dense granular media. This will lead to a better understanding of the fundamental failure mechanisms and flow patterns in the regimes when the injected fluid not only permeates through, but also displaces, the granular media. Fundamental understanding of such an injection process is crucial to many civil, environmental, and petroleum applications, e.g., grouting for ground improvement, hydraulic fracturing for hydrocarbon recovery, drill cuttings reinjection for solid waste disposal, construction of permeable reactive barriers for environmental remediation, and CO2 sequestration for greenhouse gases reduction. While extensive literature exists for the two limiting cases when granular media either behave as rigid porous media or are dispersed in a fluid to behave as a dilute suspension, the injection process in densely packed granular media, where grain displacements occur due to fluid flow, is not yet well understood. The research is interdisciplinary, requiring knowledge from the fields of geomechanics, geotechnical engineering, fluid mechanics, and soft matter physics. The transition in granular media behavior from solid-like to fluid-like will be explored through an integrated experimental and theoretical research approach. Basic scientific issues to be addressed include: (a) establishing conditions that govern the transition of failure/flow regimes, (b) characterizing the failure/flow geometry and the evolution of internal fluid pressure, and (c) developing scaling laws to generalize the results for conditions of practical relevance. Experimental work will first be conducted with novel imaging and sensing techniques to extract grain kinematics and fluid pressure distribution. The injection process will then be analyzed using the Discrete Element Method coupled with fluid flow schemes. The research will have direct application to several significant engineering problems, such as the determination of geological formation storage capacity, and the limits to the safe disposal of drill cuttings into subsurface formations. Results from the research will be published in scholarly journals, disseminated through collaboration with industry, and integrated into undergraduate and graduate courses. Encouraging women to pursue engineering will be the main focus of undergraduate education and outreach activities. The PI will actively recruit women undergraduate students to gain research experiences. Hands-on experiments will be developed for summer camps organized for middle school girls by Georgia Tech's Women in Engineering Program. In addition, the PI will host a local high school teacher, through the Georgia Tech Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Technology, to conduct summer research and to develop a geomechanics/geotechnical engineering based software module to be used in the new Environmental Science and Earth Systems courses, to improve the performance standards in K-12 education in Georgia. The software will be disseminated through the Georgia Science Teachers Association conference. The process of fluid injection into granular media is relevant to many engineering applications, as cited above. However, the pattern of flow and eventual fate of the injected fluids is poorly understood, leading to significant safety concerns in many situations. This research will lead to a clearer understanding of these issues, as well as safer engineering practices that are no longer based primarily on empirical data. Industrial collaborators from Schlumberger and Algenol Biofuels will help translate the research findings into engineering practice.

该学院早期职业发展（CAREER）计划奖的研究目标是开发一个综合的理论和实验计划，以表征流体注入致密颗粒介质的过程。这将导致更好地理解的基本故障机制和流型的制度时，注入的流体不仅渗透，而且取代，粒状介质。对这种注入过程的基本理解对于许多民用、环境和石油应用是至关重要的，例如，用于地面改良的灌浆、用于油气回收的水力压裂、用于固体废物处理的钻屑回注、用于环境修复的可渗透反应屏障的建造以及用于减少温室气体的CO2封存。 虽然大量的文献存在的两个极限情况下，颗粒介质要么表现为刚性多孔介质或分散在流体中表现为一种稀悬浮液，注射过程中密集堆积的颗粒介质，其中颗粒位移发生由于流体流动，尚未得到很好的理解。 该研究是跨学科的，需要地质力学，岩土工程，流体力学和软物质物理学领域的知识。将通过综合实验和理论研究方法探索颗粒介质行为从固体状到流体状的转变。要解决的基本科学问题包括：（a）确定控制故障/流动状态转变的条件，（B）表征故障/流动几何形状和内部流体压力的演变，以及（c）制定标度律，以将结果推广到实际相关的条件。实验工作将首先进行与新的成像和传感技术，以提取粮食运动学和流体压力分布。然后，将使用离散单元法结合流体流动方案来分析注射过程。该研究将直接应用于几个重要的工程问题，如地质地层存储容量的确定，以及钻屑进入地下地层的安全处置的限制。 研究结果将发表在学术期刊上，通过与行业合作传播，并纳入本科和研究生课程。鼓励妇女攻读工程学将是本科教育和推广活动的主要重点。PI将积极招收女本科生，以获得研究经验。实践实验将为格鲁吉亚理工学院的妇女工程项目为中学女生组织的夏令营开发。此外，PI将通过格鲁吉亚科技中心教育整合科学，数学和技术，主办当地高中教师进行夏季研究，并开发地质力学/岩土工程为基础的软件模块，用于新的环境科学和地球系统课程，以提高在格鲁吉亚K-12教育的性能标准。 该软件将通过格鲁吉亚科学教师协会会议传播。 如上所述，将流体注入到颗粒介质中的过程与许多工程应用相关。然而，流动模式和注入流体的最终命运知之甚少，导致在许多情况下的重大安全问题。 这项研究将导致对这些问题的更清晰的理解，以及不再主要基于经验数据的更安全的工程实践。 来自斯伦贝谢和Algenol Biofuels的工业合作者将帮助将研究成果转化为工程实践。