Construct · 3 fields · 4 citations
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In physics, capillarity is the movement of a liquid through narrow spaces driven by surface tension and the liquid's attraction to the surrounding solid, so that a wetting liquid climbs a thin tube and rises higher the narrower the tube. Young's 1805 An essay on the cohesion of fluids gave the account of contact angle and the balance of surface forces at the liquid edge that underlies the effect, later paired with Laplace's law for the curved interface. The referent is an interfacial force balance, quantified by the capillary rise height and the pressure jump across a curved meniscus, and it is the same physics that holds water in soil and traps oil in rock.[1][2]
In soil physics the same force governs how water is held and moved in the ground: the fine pore spaces between soil grains act as a tangle of irregular capillaries that draw water upward from a water table and retain it against gravity, so that the energy state of soil water (its matric potential) rises steeply as the soil dries. Richards's 1931 Capillary conduction of liquids through porous mediums turned this into the governing flow equation that still bears his name, linking water content, potential, and unsaturated conductivity. It is the identical surface-tension capillarity of a glass tube, realised in a disordered granular medium, and measured by soil-water potential and retention curves rather than by a single rise height.[3]
In petroleum and reservoir engineering the same construct sets how oil, water, and gas share the pore space of a rock: the pressure difference across the curved interface between two immiscible fluids in a pore, the capillary pressure, decides which fluid wets the grains, how high a fluid rises above a contact, and how much oil clings to the rock and resists displacement. Leverett's 1941 Capillary behavior in porous solids showed that these pressures collapse onto a single dimensionless function of saturation, the Leverett J-function, across different rocks. It is the same surface-tension capillarity as in a tube or a soil, measured here by capillary-pressure–saturation curves and used to estimate recoverable oil.[4]
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