Horizontal flow and capillarity-driven redistribution in porous media.

A recent macroscopic mixture theory for two-phase immiscible displacement in porous media has introduced percolating and nonpercolating phases. Quasi-analytic solutions are computed and compared to the traditional theory. The solutions illustrate physical insights and effects due to spatiotemporal changes of nonpercolating phases, and they highlight the differences from traditional theory. Two initial and boundary value problems are solved in one spatial dimension. In the first problem a fluid is displaced by another fluid in a horizontal homogeneous porous medium. The displacing fluid is injected with a flow rate that keeps the saturation constant at the injection point. In the second problem a horizontal homogeneous porous medium is considered which is divided into two subdomains with different but constant initial saturations. Capillary forces lead to a redistribution of the fluids. Errors in the literature are reported and corrected.

Numerical solutions of a generalized theory for macroscopic capillarity.

A recent macroscopic theory of biphasic flow in porous media [R. Hilfer, Phys. Rev. E 73, 016307 (2006)] has proposed to treat microscopically percolating fluid regions differently from microscopically nonpercolating regions. Even in one dimension the theory reduces to an analytically intractable set of ten coupled nonlinear partial differential equations. This paper reports numerical solutions for three different initial and boundary value problems that simulate realistic laboratory experiments. All three simulations concern a closed column containing a homogeneous porous medium filled with two immiscible fluids of different densities. In the first simulation the column is raised from a horizontal to a vertical orientation inducing a buoyancy-driven fluid flow that separates the two fluids. In the second simulation the column is first raised from a horizontal to a vertical orientation and subsequently rotated twice by 180 degrees to compare the resulting stationary saturation profiles. In the third simulation the column is first raised from horizontal to vertical orientation and then returned to its original horizontal orientation. In all three simulations imbibition and drainage processes occur simultaneously inside the column. This distinguishes the results reported here from conventional simulations based on existing theories of biphasic flows. Existing theories are unable to predict flow processes where imbibition and drainage occur simultaneously. The approximate numerical results presented here show the same process dependence and hysteresis as one would expect from an experiment.