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 injection into an air–saturated porous medium is studied experimentally. To this end, vertical glass tubes are packed with dry quartz sand and injected with dry steam. The propagation of the steam front appears to be proportional to t. It is observed that the water saturation is homogeneously distributed and remains below the irreducible water saturation. Furthermore, the theoretical model of Brouwers and Li (1994) of the process is applied to the experiments and extended to take wall effects into account. A comparison of the predicted front penetration and amount of condensed water with the experimental results yields fairly good agreement.