Viscous Fingering through Two Dimensional Porous Layer in Microgravity Environment

Abstract

Slow fluid-fluid displacement in a porous medium under the influence of real microgravity field is going to reveal important fluid physics associated with hydrology, chemical engineering and the physics of disordered media. Most systems of practical importance include fluids of different densities. Therefore it is important to study the effect of gravity on the front/displacement-structure (fingering: due to the nonlinear interactions among viscous, capillary and gravitational forces). CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis glycerin/water mixture through two dimensional single layer aniso-tropic artificial porous layer have been performed in ground level condition as well as microgravity modifying the body force source term in the momentum equation through UDF(user defined functions) written in C. Ground level experiment to capture fingering has also been performed to validate the CFD results. Fingering structures in the microgravity and g-jitter conditions have been predicted using the validated CFD model.