Narrow Results

Three different states of a dispersed nonwetting liquid (water) in the Fluka 100 C8 and Fluka 100 C18 disordered porous media, as well as transitions between these states under variation of the temperature and the degree of filling, have been revealed. It has been shown that the appearance of such states is due to the broadening of the pore size distribution function f(R), fluctuations of configurations of neighbors in the system of pores and fluctuations in the configuration of a pore and its environment consisting of filled and empty pores in the percolation cluster. These states and transitions are caused by the competition between the effective repulsion of the nonwetting liquid from the wall of the pore, which is responsible for the "extrusion" of the liquid from the pore, and the effective collective "multiparticle" attraction of the liquid cluster in the pore to clusters in the neighboring connected pores. The observed difference in the behavior of the Fluka 100 C8/water and Fluka 100 C18/water systems and the previously studied Libersorb-23 (L23)/water system indicates a significant dependence of the state of these systems on the type of disorder in them.

This paper provides information on a self-consistent model of an anomalously slow relaxation of nonwetting liquid–nanoporous medium systems with a random size distribution of pores, which introduces changes in interaction between local liquid cluster configurations in the process of liquid outflow from the porous medium. A self-consistent equation was deduced, the solution of which determines a functional connection of porous medium filling degree or time $𝜃(t)$. It is shown that the anomalously slow relaxation is presented as a process of decay of interacting local metastable configurations, initialized by thermal fluctuations. As time increments, relaxation acceleration takes place with subsequent avalanche fluid outflow from the porous medium, which is connected with interaction decrease between local configurations. The dependence of the fraction of volume of liquid remaining in a porous medium changes by the power law $𝜃(t)\sim t^{-\alpha (T,t)}$. It is shown that for a system of water–L23 at the initial stage in the time range of $10s<t<{10}^{3}s$, an index assumes a constant value $\alpha \approx \mathrm{\text{const}}(T)$, while at the following stage the acceleration of relaxation and the increase of parameter $\alpha (T,t)$ are observed.