UNIVERSAL STABILITY PROPERTIES FOR MULTILAYER HELE-SHAW FLOWS AND APPLICATION TO INSTABILITY CONTROL Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • With the motivation of understanding the effect of various injection policies currently in practice for chemical enhanced oil recovery, we study linear stability of displacement processes in a Hele-Shaw cell involving injection of an arbitrary number of fluid phases in succession. This work mainly builds upon our earlier study of the three-layer case [P. Daripa, Phys. Fluids, 20 (2008), 112101]. Stability results obtained for an arbitrary number of displacing fluids in succession reduce to the Saffman-Taylor case when there is only one displacing fluid. The stability results have been applied here to design injection policies that are considerably less unstable than the pure Saffman- Taylor case. In particular, two sets of parameters have been obtained that improve stability. Implementation of such injection policies based on the application of the stability results is likely to improve oil recovery. 2012 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

published proceedings

  • SIAM JOURNAL ON APPLIED MATHEMATICS

author list (cited authors)

  • Daripa, P., & Ding, X.

citation count

  • 8

complete list of authors

  • Daripa, Prabir||Ding, Xueru

publication date

  • January 2012