Sorption of water-glycerol mixtures in porous Al2O3 studied with NMR imaging

•NMR imaging can be used to quantify liquid component transport in porous media.•Imbibition of water-glycerol mixtures can be described by Darcy's law.•Parameter scaling predicted with Darcy's law holds in sub-micrometer regime.•No separation of water-glycerol mixtures occurs during uptake in porous Al2O3.

The penetration of water-glycerol mixtures in porous Al2O3 is measured using NMR imaging to quantitatively describe the liquid penetration and possible front separation of liquids in non-transparent porous media. We have studied the dependency on viscosity over two orders of magnitude by changing the glycerol concentration and have investigated the effect of pore size in the micrometer and sub-micrometer regime. We show that the liquid dynamics can be accurately described by Darcy's law for all investigated liquid - media combinations and show that the permeability scales with the pore radius squared as predicted by permeability models by Lucas-Washburn and Katz-Thompson. Furthermore we have used T2 relaxation analysis to investigate the homogeneity of the imbibing mixture during uptake and have found that water-glycerol mixtures penetrate the porous Al2O3 samples as a single homogeneous liquid.