During the past 60 min, oil companies have extracted 6 trillion liters of oil from the ground, thereby giving a striking illustration of the impact of multiphase flows on the world economy. From a fundamental perspective, we largely understand the dynamics of interfaces separating immiscible fluids driven through heterogeneous environments. In stark contrast, the basic mechanisms ruling the transport of fragmented fluids, such as foams and emulsions, remain elusive with studies mostly limited to isolated droplets and bubbles. Here, we demonstrate that the mobilization of emulsion driven through model disordered media is a critical plastic depinning transition. To elucidate this collective dynamics, we track the trajectories of hundreds of thousands of microfluidic droplets advected through random lattices of pinning sites. Their dynamics reveals that macroscopic mobilization only requires the coordinated motion of small groups of particles and does not involve any large-scale avalanches. Criticality arises from the interplay between contact and hydrodynamic interaction, which channel seemingly erratic depinning events along smectic river networks correlated over system spanning scales. Beyond the specifics of emulsion transport, we close our article discussing the similarities and profound differences with the plastic depinning transitions of driven flux lines in high-T c superconductors, charged colloids, and grain transport in eroded sand beds.
Keywords: dynamical phase transition; heterogeneous media; plastic depinning; transport.