An overview of instability and fingering during immiscible fluid flow in porous and fractured media

Abstract

Wetting front instability is an important phenomenon affecting fluid flow and contaminant transport in unsaturated soils and rocks. It causes the development of fingers which travel faster than would a uniform front and thus bypass much of the medium. Water saturation and solute concentration in such fingers tend to be higher than in the surrounding medium. During infiltration, fingering may cause unexpectedly rapid arrival of water and solute at the water-table. This notwithstanding, most models of subsurface flow and transport ignore instability and fingering. In this report, we survey the literature to assess the extent to which this may or may not be justified. Our overview covers experiments, theoretical studies, and computer simulations of instability and fingering during immiscible two-phase flow and transport, with emphasis on infiltration into soils and fractured rocks. Our description of instability in an ideal fracture (Hele-Shaw cell) includes an extension of existing theory to fractures and interfaces having arbitrary orientations in space. Our discussion of instability in porous media includes a slight but important correction of existing theory for the case of an inclined interface. We conclude by outlining some potential directions for future research. Among these, we single out the effect of soil and rock heterogeneities on instability and preferential flow as meriting special attention in the context of nuclear waste storage in unsaturated media.