New viscous and dissolution fingering instabilities in porous media with
dead-end pores in miscible displacements
Abstract
Improving the understanding of mechanisms involved in low miscible
displacement efficiency is significant for a wide spectrum of
applications in subsurface, from environment such as groundwater
remediation and CO2 sequestration to energy extraction such as enhanced
oil recovery and geothermal recovery. Two key limiting factors to the
efficiency are viscous fingering (VF) instability and dead-end pores in
porous media. Previous research on VF simply assumes all pores are well
connected and fluids can be mobilized by convection. However, fluids
trapped in dead-end pores, such as non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) in
groundwater remediation, are inaccessible to convection, resulting in
even less efficient displacements. Instead of the classic
convection-diffusion/dispersion equation, in this work, we use a
fundamentally different capacitance model to incorporate the mass
transfer between two pore types in miscible displacements. The hybrid
pseudo-spectral and high-order finite difference methods are employed to
solve the governing equations in a fixed reference frame for simulating
the flow dynamics. A new dissolution fingering (DF) mechanism is
identified for the first time in miscible displacements. It is induced
by VF and caused by slow dissolution of trapped NAPLs from dead-end
pores to their adjacent well-connected pores. It is found the two
fingering mechanisms interact and together determine the remaining NAPLs
in the full ‘life cycle’ displacements. A simple model is also developed
to accurately predict the NAPL concentration behind the finger trailing
front which has not been examined previously. Six flow regimes, four of
which are new, are then identified.