Impact of viscous fingering and permeability heterogeneity on fluid mixing in porous media

摘要: Fluid mixing plays a fundamental role in many natural and engineered processes, including groundwater flows porous media, enhanced oil recovery, microfluidic lab-on-a-chip systems. Recent developments have explored the effect of viscosity contrast on mixing, suggesting that unstable displacement fluids with different viscosities, or viscous fingering, provides powerful mechanism to increase fluid-fluid interfacial area enhance mixing. However, existing studies not incorporated medium heterogeneity rate. Here, we characterize evolution between two heterogeneous media. We focus practical scenario divergent-convergent flow quarter five spot geometry prototypical well-driven flows. study by means numerical simulations impact permeability breakthrough curves efficiency, rationalize nontrivial behavior emerges from competition creation channeling.