How Heterogeneous Pore Scale Distributions of Wettability Affect Infiltration into Porous Media

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors studied the imbibition process in soil, where they focused on the wettability condition of the surface. They explored different contact angles and coating patterns by using Lattice Boltzmann simulations. The article deserves publication as it is. 

The authors could explain or mention how they overtook the spurious current problem due to the high density ratio.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors tried to simulate the effect of hydrophobic sites in the penetration of liquid into a porous media. The topic is interesting and the results are acceptable. The author recommends to publish the manuscript after a revision.

• Define the unites like Mu, Lu ?
• Figure 2 doesn’t have legend please add legend in the inset of the figure. line shows what and symbols shows what?
• How you determined phi0 in equation 8, and what is the effect of its variation in the result.
• 3 how you defined the number of the reduced wettable sites? It is clear from figure 7 (b) that the hydrophilic sites size is not the same as the reduced wettable sites but they are approximately the same in figure 7 (b), then how you define the number of the sites?
• Please shows the pore body and pore throat in one of the figures, could be figure 10.
• Please clearly define the body-phobic and throat phobic in a sentence and in possible in the figure to be clearer, indeed before figure 17 I did not understand what does body-phobic and throat phobic means clearly.
• What is the difference between the throat-phobic and stripes in figure 18.
• Since the coating spots in your soil model figure 9 is so small comparing to the flow area and the number are so limited, do you think considering these hydrophobic sites are important I final result? I recommend to do one more simulation for pure hydrophilic soil particles and compare the results with the current results. It will enrich your paper.
• The carelessness in writing is observed in the text specially in the figure captions, please read the manuscript carefully and resolve the problems.
• Please add a nomenclature to the manuscript.
• The introduction needs to be improved by citing some pioneering work in the simulation of fluid flow in porous media such as :
• Seta T, Takegoshi E, Okui K. Lattice Boltzmann simulation of natural convection in porous media[J]. Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, 2006, 72(2-6): 195-200.
• Guo Z, Zhao T S. Lattice Boltzmann model for incompressible flows through porous media[J]. Physical review E, 2002, 66(3): 036304.
• Abouei Mehrizi, Abbasali, et al. "Lattice Boltzmann simulation of heat transfer enhancement in a cold plate using porous medium." Journal of heat transfer11 (2013).

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

It is ready for publication.