A Molecular Dynamics Investigation on Methane Flow and Water Droplets Sliding in Organic Shale Pores with Nano-structured Roughness

Wei Yong, Yingfang Zhou* (Corresponding Author)

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)
2 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Roughness of surfaces significantly influences how methane and water flow in shale nanopores. We perform Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate the influence of surface roughness on pore scale transport of pure methane as well as of two-phase methane-water systems with the water sliding as droplets over the pore surface. For single phase methane flow, surface roughness shows a limited influence on bulk methane density, while it significantly reduces the methane flow capacity. In methane-water systems the mobility of water is a strong function of surface roughness including a clear transition between immobile and mobile water droplets. For cases with mobile water, droplet sliding speeds were correlated with pressure gradient and surface roughness. Sliding water droplets hardly deform, i.e., there is little difference between their advancing and receding contact angle with structured roughness.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)69-87
Number of pages19
JournalTransport in Porous Media
Volume144
Early online date25 Sept 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2022

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the University of Aberdeen HPC (High Performance Computing) service for providing computational resources. W. Yong gratefully acknowledge the financial support from China Scholarship Council for his Ph.D. study (No. 201708060349).

Data Availability Statement

Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-021-01685-0.

Keywords

  • Shale gas
  • Nanopore-scale simulation
  • Surface roughness
  • Methane
  • Wettability
  • Molecular dynamics

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