Gas migration through a soft, liquid-saturated granular material involves a strong coupling between the motion of the gas and the deformation of the material. This process is central to many natural and industrial systems, such as the generation and venting of gases from lake beds and waste ponds. We link grain-scale fluid and solid mechanics with macroscopic migration, trapping, and venting using high-resolution experiments and a simple mechanistic model. We find that the largest amount of trapping and the largest venting events occur at intermediate confining stress.
Read the paper: Lee et al., PRFluids 2020