Influences of Dead‐End Pores in Porous Media on Viscous Fingering Instabilities and Cleanup of NAPLs in Miscible Displacements

Abstract

Miscible displacement processes in porous media, where the interfacial tension between two fluids is zero, are of particular interest in a wide spectrum of applications such as soil and water contaminate remediation (

Impact of Wettability Alteration on the Front Instability of Immiscible Displacement in Porous Media

“…The numerical analyses of front instability of immiscible displacement mainly focus on viscous instabilities between two immiscible fluids that are dependent on the viscosity ratio (An et al., 2020; Bakharev et al., 2020; Chuoke et al., 1959; Gorell & Homsy, 1983; Peters & Flock, 1981; Sorbie et al., 2020; Yuan et al., 2021). Some studies also emphasize the impact of physical diffusion and dispersion (Christie & Bond, 1987), heterogeneity of the system (Farthing et al., 2012; Luo et al., 2018), and capillary pressure (Berg & Ott, 2012; Chen et al., 2017; Ott & Berg, 2013) on the front instability.…”

Dense non-aqueous phase liquid chlorinated contaminant detected far from the source release area in an aquifer

“…Unfortunately, the data from these laboratory and field experiments often do not have the resolution to detect theoretically possible small, disperse occurrences (e.g., micro-or even nano-blobs) of non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPL) [28][29][30] . It is difficult enough to directly detect larger occurrences of NAPL in pools or large ganglia which occur in complex three-dimensional structures (architecture) as a result of spatially and temporally heterogeneous transport in heterogeneous and anisotropic porous media 13,29,[31][32][33][34][35] . The much smaller micro-NAPL occurrences, postulated here, would likely be held within porous media as a residual outside of the predominant groundwater advective pathways and would be more difficult to directly detect or mobilize for collection 1,36 .…”