Stability of frontal displacement of fluids in a porous medium in the presence of interphase mass transfer and phase transitions

Abstract

To preserve the stability of the front relative to small perturbations when one fluid is displaced by another the pressure gradient must decrease on crossing the front in the direction of displacement. Initially, this criterion was established for the piston displacement of fluids [1, 2], and later in the case of two-phase flow of immiscible fluids in porous media for the displacement front corresponding to the saturation jump in the Buckley—Leverett problem [3, 4]. Below it is shown that the same stability criterion remains valid for flows in porous media accompanied by interphase mass transfer and phase transitions [5, 6]. Processes of these kinds are encountered in displacing oil from beds using active physicochemical or thermal methods [7] and usually reduce to pumping into the bed a slug (finite quantity) of reagent after which a displacing agent (water or gas) is forced in. The slug volume may be fairly small, especially when expensive reagents are employed, and, accordingly, in these cases the question of the stability of displacement is one of primary importance. These active processes are characterized by the formation in the displacement zone of multiwave structures which, in the large-scale approximation (i.e., with capillary, diffusion and nonequilibrium effects neglected), correspond to discontinuous distributions of the phase saturations and component concentrations [5–10]. It is shown that the stability condition for a plane front, corresponding to a certain jump, does not depend on the type of jump [11, 12] and for a constant total flow is determined, as in simpler cases, by the relation between the total phase mobilities at the jump. An increase in total flow in the direction of displacement is destabilizing, while a decrease has a stabilizing influence on the stability of the front. Other trends in the investigation of the stability of flows in porous media are reviewed in [13].