Pore-scale difference between miscible and immiscible viscous fingering in porous media

Autor: Jing-Den Chen
Rok vydání: 1987
Předmět:
Zdroj: AIChE Journal. 33:307-311
ISSN: 1547-5905
0001-1541
DOI: 10.1002/aic.690330218
Popis: When one fluid displaces another in a porous medium, the displacement can be stable or unstable. Viscous fingering is an unstable phenomenon that occurs when a less viscous fluid displaces a more viscous one. During oil recovery viscous fingering results in a poor recovery due to the bypass of the resident oil by the displacing fluid. In an oil reservoir there is randomness of many different length scales, ranging from pore size to reservoir size. Viscous fingering can have many different length scales due to the randomness. It is important to understand how the randomness on different scales affects the development of fingering. In this note the authors report experiments on the displacement stability in two-dimensional network models of porous media. The purpose of this work is to better understand the pore-scale phenomena of displacement. Immiscible viscous fingering in a two-dimensional network model, with negligible effects of the interfacial tension, has been studied. Although qualitative agreement was found between simulations and experiments for the immiscible case, some fundamental difference was found for the miscible case. The cause of difference and other relevant experimental observations are discussed.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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