Fingering instability in immiscible displacement.
Departing from the classical Buckley-Leverett theory for two-phase immiscible flows in porous media, a reduced evolution equation for the water-oil displacement front is formulated and studied numerically. The reduced model successfully reproduces the basic features of the finger-forming dynamics observed in recent direct numerical simulations.
Babchin
Alexander
A
Heavy Oil and Oil Sands, Alberta Research Council, Edmonton, Alberta T6N 1E4, Canada. babchin@arc.ab.ca
Brailovsky
Irina
I
Gordon
Peter
P
Sivashinsky
Gregory
G