During water flooding of viscous oil reservoirs, adverse mobility ratio leads to an unstable displacement and thus viscous fingering. Previous research in viscous fingering has focused on low flow rates and high permeability systems (above 1 Darcy). This paper provides a more thorough and systematic study of the factors affecting viscous fingering including lower permeability, different...
In the present study, miscible displacements are investigated through nonlinear numerical simulations. A practical scenario with concentration-dependent diffusion and velocity-induced dispersion is considered, which is widely encountered in many areas involving flow and transport in subsurface porous media. Different with most of previous studies with a constant injection rate, the...
Pattern formation is ubiquitous in many physical or chemical processes and has been at the center of attention for the past couple of decades. In many instances, interfacial instabilities play a central role in creating these patterns and controlling their spatiotemporal evolution. Perhaps one of the most well-known examples is the striking figures generated when a high-viscosity fluid is...
We study the effect of a non-monotonic viscosity profile on miscible viscous fingering in porous media. This hydrodynamic instability is studied by coupling the continuity and Darcy equations with a convection-diffusion equation for solute concentration that determines the viscosity. A toy viscosity model composed of a sequence of transformation in a sine function is considered. Parametric...
The flow of multiple immiscible fluids at the pore scale is sensitive to local porosity fluctuations that can be measured as pore scale disorder. Our high fidelity direct numerical simulations of pore scale multiphase flow indicate that the degree of disorder governs the expression of viscous instability at the pore scale. Instability is suppressed when porosity is highly ordered even for...
Waves in chromatography are well known to the practitioners. Characteristics of these waves are strongly correlated to the nature of the adsorption isotherm. We model the displacement of a finite slice containing an adsorbed solute by a carrier liquid flow. We examine the nonlinear dynamics that emerge from the interactions of rarefaction, shock layer and/or viscous fingers (VF) in the finite...
The aim of this study was to experimentally determine a relationship between gas residual saturation (SGR) and corresponding hydraulic conductivity (K) of two coarse sands. The SGR indicates the ratio of volume of entrapped air bubbles to pore volume of the sample.
Series of constant head infiltration-outflow experiments were used to determine the relationship between the K and the...
Miscible displacements in porous media are investigated through nonlinear numerical simulations. At a relatively larger flow rate or a wider gap of Hele-Shaw cell, the inertia must be considered and its role needs to be carefully investigated. In the present study, the Reynolds number is used to quantify the inertial forces. Its effect is measured by examining the variations of viscous...
