Manufacturing a Micro-model with Integrated Fibre Optic Pressure Sensors

I M Zarikos; S M Hassanizadeh; L M van Oosterhout; W van Oordt

doi:10.1007/s11242-018-1000-y

Manufacturing a Micro-model with Integrated Fibre Optic Pressure Sensors

Transp Porous Media. 2018;122(1):221-234. doi: 10.1007/s11242-018-1000-y. Epub 2018 Jan 11.

Authors

I M Zarikos¹, S M Hassanizadeh¹, L M van Oosterhout¹, W van Oordt²

Affiliations

¹ 1Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, Budapestlaan 4, 3584 CD Utrecht, The Netherlands.
² 2Department of Chemical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, van der Maasweg 9, 2629 HZ Delft, The Netherlands.

Abstract

The measurement of fluid pressure inside pores is a major challenge in experimental studies of two-phase flow in porous media. In this paper, we describe the manufacturing procedure of a micro-model with integrated fibre optic pressure sensors. They have a circular measurement window with a diameter of 260 $μ m$ , which enables the measurement of pressure at the pore scale. As a porous medium, we used a PDMS micro-model with known physical and surface properties. A given pore geometry was produced following a procedure we had developed earlier. We explain the technology behind fibre optic pressure sensors and the procedure for integrating these sensors into a micro-model and demonstrate their utility for the measurement of pore pressure under transient two-phase flow conditions. Finally, we present and analyse results of single and two-phase flow experiments performed in the micro-model and discuss the link between small-scale fast pressure changes with pore-scale events.

Keywords: Micro-model; Pore-scale pressure measurement; Two-phase flow.