Flow-Induced Compaction of Visco-Elastic and Visco-Plastic Soft Porous Media

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Summary There are numerous industrial, biological and geophysical applications in which a viscous fluid flows through a soft porous medium. Characteristically, the fluid exerts a drag on the solid matrix and induces non-uniform deformation, the precise nature of which is controlled by the rheology of the medium. In this paper, the role of medium rheology in one-dimensional, flow-induced compaction and decompaction of soft porous media is explored theoretically. The deformation of elastic and plastic soft porous media is compared, and the interaction with a bulk medium viscosity is examined. Two configurations are considered: flow through ‘pre-strained’ media, in which the medium is initially compressed by an external load, and flow reversal, in which the direction of flow alternates over multiple cycles. In each of these cases, spatial variations in stress arising from fluid flow must interact with the stress history of the sample, resulting in contrasting behaviour for visco-elastic and visco-plastic media.