Impact of viscous fingering and permeability heterogeneity on fluid mixing in porous media
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Juanes_Impact of viscous.pdf
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Author(s)
Nicolaides, Christos
Jha, Birendra
Cueto-Felgueroso, Luis
Juanes, Ruben
Date Issued
April 2015
Journal
Water Resources Research
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (Wiley platform)
Citation
Nicolaides, Christos, Birendra Jha, Luis Cueto-Felgueroso, and Ruben Juanes. “Impact of Viscous Fingering and Permeability Heterogeneity on Fluid Mixing in Porous Media.” Water Resour. Res. 51, no. 4 (April 2015): 2634–2647. © 2015 American Geophysical Union
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Fluid mixing plays a fundamental role in many natural and engineered processes, including groundwater flows in porous media, enhanced oil recovery, and microfluidic lab-on-a-chip systems. Recent developments have explored the effect of viscosity contrast on mixing, suggesting that the unstable displacement of fluids with different viscosities, or viscous fingering, provides a powerful mechanism to increase fluid-fluid interfacial area and enhance mixing. However, existing studies have not incorporated the effect of medium heterogeneity on the mixing rate. Here, we characterize the evolution of mixing between two fluids of different viscosity in heterogeneous porous media. We focus on a practical scenario of divergent-convergent flow in a quarter five spot geometry prototypical of well-driven groundwater flows. We study by means of numerical simulations the impact of permeability heterogeneity and viscosity contrast on the breakthrough curves and mixing efficiency, and we rationalize the nontrivial mixing behavior that emerges from the competition between the creation of fluid-fluid interfacial area and channeling.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Sloan School of Management
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/2014WR015811
