On the stability of Taylor bubbles inside a confined highly porous medium

This work focuses on the local hydrodynamics of a multiphase gas-liquid flow forced into an innovative medium of high porosity (96%): an open cell solid foam. The gas (nitrogen) and liquid (ethanol) phases are injected at constant flow-rates in a millichannel to form a well-controlled Taylor flow which enters the porous medium. Based on a fluorescence technique, the apparent liquid holdup in the porous medium is quantified, and its evolution in time and along the porous medium extracted from spatiotemporal diagrams. The analysis of the main frequency, when varying the gas-liquid flow-rate ratio, leads to the identification of two hydrodynamic regimes. A model based on a scaling analysis is proposed to quantify the dimensionless numbers describing the transition between both regimes. It points out that the bubble length fixed by the Taylor flow is the control parameter. The model prediction of the critical bubble length at which the transition occurs is in good agreement with the experimental observations.