Inertial effects on dynamics of immiscible viscous fingering in homogenous porous media

Shahid Rabbani, Hamid Abderrahmane, Mohamed Sassi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present a comparative study of the onset and propagation dynamics of the fingering phenomenon in uniform porous media with a radial configuration. With the help of the Finite Element Method (FEM)-based 2D simulations and image processing techniques, we investigate finger morphology, growth rate, interfacial length, finger length and the number of fingers which are affected due to inertial forces and convective acceleration in a two-phase porous media flow. We considered a modified Darcy's law with inertial force coupled with convective acceleration and investigate their impact on interfacial instability with different velocity-viscosity combinations. Interestingly, the consequences of inertial corrections become significant with changes in viscosity at high Reynolds numbers. Due to the intrinsic bifurcation nature of inertial forces in the radial flow geometry, finger morphology is changed mostly at high viscosity ratios. We find that the effects of inertia and convective acceleration are markedly significant at relatively high Reynolds numbers while the interfacial length and the number of fingers - which are important parameters for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) - are most affected by the neglecting of these forces. Moreover, at high Reynolds numbers, the rate of growth of fingering instabilities and the fractal number tend to deviate from that for Darcy's law.

Original languageBritish English
Article number79
JournalFluids
Volume4
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2019

Keywords

  • Fingering
  • Hydrodynamic instability
  • Inertial effects
  • Multiphase flow
  • Porous media flow

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