Multiphase Flow in Porous Media

Introduction

Many natural and technical processes involve multiphase flow processes in porous media. Despite that fact fundamental concepts of twophase flow on macroscopic scales still remain unclear. The predictive power of the most commonly used extended multiphase Darcy theory is at best limited to simple problems where neither hysteresis nor dynamic effects like trapping nor varying residual saturations have a substantial impact on the solutions. Alternative theories range from purely heuristic hysteresis models (e.g. Mualem 1974), as well as adding terms to equations to e.g. include dynamic effects, (e.g. Hassanizadeh et. al. (1993) to adding phases and equations into the model, e.g. interfacial areas (Niessner et. al. (2008)).

Our Project

It is known that percolating and nonpercolating fluid parts show fundamental different behavior (e.g. Abrams (1975), Avraam et al. (1995), Taber (1969), Wyckoff (1936)) and a macroscopic model which takes into account the difference of nonpercolating and percolating fluid parts was proposed by R. Hilfer (1998) and elaborated in succeeding works (see below).

Current Coworkers

• Prof. Dr. Rudolf Hilfer, Project supervisor
• Florian Doster, PhD Student

Collaborations

• The project is part of Nupus (International Research Training Group 'Non-linearities and Upscaling in PoroUS media').
• Prof. Dr. Paul Zegeling, Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Sciences, Utrecht University
• Prof. Dr. Majid Hassanizadeh, Department of Earth Sciences, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University

Publications

• Unknown author.
  Unknown title.
  unknown year.