Buckley–Leverett Theory for Two-Phase Immiscible Fluids Flow Model with Explicit Phase-Coupling Terms

Abstract

The theory of two-phase immiscible flow in porous media is based on the extension of single phase models through the concept of relative permeabilities. It mimics Darcy’s law for a fixed average saturation through the introduction of saturation-based permeabilities to model the momentum exchange between the phases. In this paper, we present a model of two-phase flow, based on the extension of Darcy’s law including the effect of capillary pressure, but considering in addition the coupling between the phases modeled through flow cross-terms. In this work, we extend the Buckley–Leverett theory to the subsequent model, and provide numerical experiments shading the light on the effect of the coupling cross-terms in comparison to the classical Darcy’s approach.

Keywords

• Darcy’s law
• two-phase flows
• phases coupling
• fractional flow
• Buckley–Leverett theory
• capillary pressure