Seminar Mojtaba Norouzisadeh

Multiphase flow in porous media occurs in a variety of scenarios, including subsurface flow in contaminant-polluted aquifers,
undersaturated petroleum reservoirs, and gas storage in aquifers. Wetting conditions are key to describing the displacement of menisci within the pore space and are typically characterized by the contact angle. However, variations in fluid composition, pH, and salinity can lead to non-monotonic changes in the contact angle, limiting the predictive capability of this approach. As an alternative, a lubrication model combined with disjoining pressure can be used to describe wetting behavior. This method accounts for intermolecular interactions directly, without relying on the concept of contact angles [Norouzisadeh2023]. In this work, we present a new OpenFOAM-based pore-scale simulator for two-phase flow that eliminates the need for the contact angle concept. The framework combines a Volume of Fluid (VOF) solver to track the fluid–fluid interface with a lubrication model to capture thin-film dynamics at the solid boundaries.