Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Stability Of The Interface Between Two Immiscible Liquids During Injection Into A Tapered Hele-Shaw Cell, Zihao Lin, Ivan C. Christov, Daihui Lu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In the early twentieth century, petroleum and mining engineers noticed that water does not displace oil uniformly. This phenomenon, when water penetrates through oil, is now known as viscous fingering. This discovery and the following extensive research have contributed to enhancing oil recovery. In this paper, we describe a numerical study conducted on the stability of the interface between two immiscible liquids in converging and diverging Hele-Shaw cells with varying gradients. Hele-Shaw cells are narrow flow geometries that mimic the properties of a porous medium with fixed permeability. By using computational tools built on the OpenFOAM platform, the multiphase flow …