Instabilities of uniform filtration flows with phase transition

Abstract

New mechanisms of instability are described for vertical flows with phase transition through horizontally extended two-dimensional regions of a porous medium. A plane surface of phase transition becomes unstable at an infinitely large wavenumber and at zero wavenumber. In the latter case, the unstable flow undergoes reversible subcritical bifurcations leading to the development of secondary flows (which may not be horizontally uniform). The evolution of subcritical modes near the instability threshold is governed by the Kolmogorov-Petrovskii-Piskunov equation. Two examples of flow through a porous medium are considered. One is the unstable flow across a water-bearing layer above a layer that carries a vapor-air mixture under isothermal conditions in the presence of capillary forces at the phase transition interface. The other is the vertical flow with phase transition in a high-temperature geothermal reservoir consisting of two high-permeability regions separated by a low-permeability stratum.