AN EXPERIMENTAL-STUDY OF CONSTANT-PRESSURE STEAM INJECTION AND TRANSIENT CONDENSING FLOW IN AN AIR-SATURATED POROUS-MEDIUM

In this paper the unsteady process of constant pressure steam injectio n into an air-saturated porous medium is studied experimentally. To th is end vertical glass tubes are packed with dry quartz sand and inject ed with dry steam The propagation of the steam front appears to be pro portional to root t. It is observed that the water saturation is homog eneously distributed and remains below the irreducible water saturatio n. Furthermore, the theoretical model of Brouwers and Li (1994) of the process is applied to the experiments and extended to take wall effec ts into account. A comparison of the predicted front penetration and a mount of condensed water with the experimental results yields fairly g ood agreement.