
Thibaud ChevalierIFP Energies nouvelles · Applied Physico-chemistry and Mechanics Division
Thibaud Chevalier
PhD
About
45
Publications
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535
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2016 - December 2023
October 2015 - August 2016
November 2013 - September 2015
Université Paris-Sud 11, CNRS, UMR 7608
Position
- PostDoc Position
Publications
Publications (45)
Clay minerals and silica are essential components of soil. Understanding the multi-scale structure of a simple model system formed of (negatively charged) beidellite clay nanoplatelets and silica nanospheres is a first step in understanding the complex structure of soil. Due to their strong shape anisotropy, clay nanoplatelets exhibit preferential...
Physico-chemical simulations are often based on time consuming statistical microstructures models. Recent works show that mathematical morphology and non-linear image processing operators could provide less time-consuming alternatives [1]. Even though these models allow a significant improvement of computation cost, the solving time for a single ru...
Complex large models of multi-scale microstructures of porous media do not exist in a manner adequately efficient to render their comprehensive analysis of textural and structural properties possible. The simulation of experimental processes, such as gas adsorption, raises two issues. First, the modeling of these complex materials must be sufficien...
Complex large models of multi-scale microstructures of porous media do not exist in a manner adequately efficient to render their comprehensive analysis of textural and structural properties possible. The simulation of experimental processes, such as gas adsorption, raises two issues. First, the modeling of these complex materials must be sufficien...
Hypotheses
The performance of bicontinuous microemulsions is usually assessed on the characteristics of the middle phase at equilibrium. However, applied to Enhanced Oil Recovery, such an evaluation would not be representative of the structure and composition of fluids in reservoir rocks. Studies on the properties of non-equilibrated microemulsions...
Applied to Enhanced Oil Recovery, microemulsions are valuable systems for extracting the crude oil trapped by capillary forces in the porous reservoir rocks. The performances of the injected formulations are often assessed by quantifying oil composition in model systems that contain relatively high amount of surfactant/co-surfactant. Recently, the...
The sinuosity of a porous microstructure may be quantified by geometric tortuosity characterization, namely the ratio of geodesic and euclidean distances. The assessment of geometric tortuosity, among other descriptors, is of importance for rigorous characterization of complex materials. This paper proposes a new way of calculation, based on a grap...
Digital twins of materials allow to achieve accurate predictions that help creating novel and tailor-made materials with higher standards. In this paper, we are interested in the characterization of porous media. Our attention is drawn to develop a method to describe accurately the pore network microstructure of porous materials as presented in [7]...
The main motivation of this work is to determine quantitatively the pore occupancy of water and oil in some source rocks. The pore occupancy might be imposed by differences in chemical composition, wettability behavior and sorption of fluids in organic and inorganic porosities and will dramatically affect the hydrocarbons flow through the porous me...
With a NMR based fast diffusion measurement technique we performed a comprehensive experimental program on 30 samples to measure the pore diffusion coefficient in two series of cement pastes, mortar and concrete made with an ordinary Portland cement (CEM I) and a composite cement (CEM V). In addition, measurements were also possible in the presence...
Wax deposition is one of the major concerns for waxy crude oil production and transportation. A better understanding and prediction of fluid properties related to this issue require knowledge of the medium structuration at scales ranging from nanometers (molecules) to a few micrometers (crystals). For this purpose, the behavior of a waxy crude oil...
We present an experimental study of a two-dimensional liquid foam, composed of a confined monolayer of bubbles, forced to flow within a model porous medium that mimics an inhomogeneous open fracture. It consists of a Hele-Shaw cell with a single localized constriction-like defect that reduces locally its gap and thus its permeability. Taking advant...
One of the challenges in the study of foam transport in 3D porous media is having an adequate spatial and temporal resolution, to get a better understanding of the local phenomenon at the pore scale in a non-destructive way. We present an experimental study in which ultra fast X-Ray microtomography is used to characterize the foam trapping while th...
We present an experimental study of foam flow characterization inside a 3D granular medium packed in a cell. The foam is formed by coinjecting a surfactant solution and gas inside a cell filled with silica grains. The porous medium is initially saturated with dodecane and water before the gas-surfactant coinjection. To simplify the interpretation o...
In this work, we studied experimentally and numerically the pressure–flow rate relationship for yield stress fluids in porous media. We developed and validated 3D numerical simulations of the velocity field via a lattice Boltzmann method based on the TRT scheme, and a specific experimental setup allowing yield stress fluids to flow in a closed-loop...
We present a general novel technique to monitor saturation changes on small rock samples of only 15 mm in diameter and 20 mm in length for the purpose of assessing the kinetics of spontaneous imbibition processes. With a fully 3D imbibition configuration involving countercurrent flows through all faces of the sample, the method is based on an NMR t...
Spontaneous imbibition processes can play an important role in oil production. It can be enhanced or influenced by wettability changes generated by properly designed chemicals or by the natural surfactants resulting from reactive crude oils in the presence of alkaline solutions. The reaction of basic salts with some components of oil can, indeed, l...
We propose a deuterium diffusion tracer approach to measure diffusion coefficient in the case of very short NMR relaxation times, too short for NMR pulsed field gradient sequences (T1 or T2 below 1 ms). We also treat the case of porous media containing metallic fibers (such as reinforced concrete) strongly disturbing the magnetic field, and the cas...
Spontaneous imbibition processes can play an important role in oil production. It can be enhanced or influenced by wettability changes generated by properly designed chemicals or by the natural surfactants resulting from reactive crude oils in the presence of alkaline solutions. The reaction of basic salts with some components of oil can, indeed, l...
The sustained lower oil price for the last three years has shifted tight oil industry interest from an intensive drilling and completion based approach to more cost effective methods aimed at maximizing rates and ultimate recovery from existing wells. In that framework, application of conventional EOR methods to unconventional tight oil well has ga...
We present an experimental study of the flow of a liquid foam, composed of a monolayer of millimetric bubbles, forced to invade an inhomogeneous medium at a constant flow rate. To model the simplest heterogeneous fracture medium, we use a Hele-Shaw cell consisting of two glass plates separated by a millimetric gap, with a local constriction. This s...
We report on numerical studies of avalanches of an autocatalytic reaction front in a porous medium. The front propagation is controlled by an adverse flow resulting in upstream, static, or downstream regimes. In an earlier study focusing on front shape, we identified three different universality classes associated with this system by following the...
We study non-inertial flows of single-phase yield stress fluids along uneven/rough-walled channels, e.g. approximating a fracture, with two main objectives. First, we re-examine the usual approaches to providing a (nonlinear) Darcy-type flow law and show that significant errors arise due to self-selection of the flowing region/fouling of the walls....
Autocatalytic reaction fronts between two reacting species in the absence of fluid flow, propagate as solitary waves. The coupling between autocatalytic reaction front and forced hydrodynamic flow may lead to stationary front whose velocity and shape depend on the underlying flow field. We focus on the issue of the chemo-hydrodynamic coupling betwe...
Autocatalytic reaction fronts between two reacting species in the absence of fluid flow, propagate as solitary waves. The coupling between autocatalytic reaction front and forced hydrodynamic flow may lead to stationary front whose velocity and shape depend on the underlying flow field. We focus on the issue of the chemo-hydrodynamic coupling betwe...
In this article, we propose a simple model to understand the critical behavior of path opening during flow of a yield stress fluid in porous media as numerically observed by Chevalier and Talon (2015). This model can be mapped to the problem of a contact line moving in an heterogeneous field. Close to the critical point, this line presents an avala...
We investigate experimentally the sweeping of a nonwetting fluid by a wetting one in a quasi-two-dimensional porous medium consisting of random obstacles. We focus primarily on the resulting phase distributions and the residual nonwetting phase saturation as a function of the normalized wetting fluid flow rate—the capillary number Ca—at steady stat...
In this paper, we numerically investigate the statistical properties of the nonflowing areas of Bingham fluid in two-dimensional porous media. First, we demonstrate that the size probability distribution of the unyielded clusters follows a power-law decay with a large size cutoff. This cutoff is shown to diverge following a power law as the imposed...
We explore the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) velocimetry and pulsed field gradient nuclear magnetic resonance (PFG NMR) data for studying the flow characteristics of yield stress fluids through model pores (a succession of ducts of different diameters) or real porous media (bead packings). We propose different methods for the quantitative...
From NMR measurements we show that the velocity field of a yield stress fluid flowing through a disordered well-connected porous medium is very close to that for a Newtonian fluid. In particular, it is shown that no arrested regions exist even at very low velocities, for which the solid regime is expected to be dominant. This suggests that these re...
To better understand the specifics of the flow of yield stress fluids in confined geometries, we opted for a multi-scale experimental and / or numerical approach in complex and model porous media. We show the usefulness of NMR for the study of yield stress fluid's flows in complex geometry. In a porous medium, we can also measure the true probabili...
We show that frustrated creep flows of yield stress fluids give rise to a boundary layer, which takes the form of a liquid region of uniform significant thickness separating two solid regions. In this boundary layer the shear rate is approximately constant for a given flow rate and the layer thickness varies extremely slowly with the flow rate.
We measured the pressure drop vs flow rate during the flow, in a wide range of velocities, of well controlled yield stress fluids through confined packings of glass beads of different sizes. A detailed analysis of the data makes it possible to extract a general expression for the pressure drop vs flow rate curve through a porous medium as a functio...
This paper presents a plasticity/damage formulation in the context of the physically based micro-continuum theory for multiphase materials described in a companion paper (see Vernerey, A physically-based micro-continuum theory, Mech. Adv. Mater. Struct., 2012). Based on a micro-structurally motivated decomposition of the deformation, the presented...